6(A)(iv). Cage beds in place of therapy

At Klatovy Hospital Psychiatric Department, monitors spoke to a woman in a cage bed. She said:

“Don’t even ask me what I can feel, we have to shut out our emotions. It doesn’t help our health – it’s not therapeutic. We feel like we are free when we can walk [outside the cage bed]. It doesn’t help to call for staff, they won’t come. Maybe if I scream they would, but night staff would never come.”

At Plzeň Hospital Psychiatric Department, a male patient told monitors how he had seen someone “in the cage” in room 12, although the door is normally closed. He explained how he was worried that he “could be put in the cage, you never know what could happen”. He speculated that “it must be terrible, what can I say, it’s horrible, scary”.

Alone in a cage bed

At Opava Psychiatric Hospital, MDAC monitors met a 68-year old woman who described the previous night she had spent in a cage bed. “It’s stupid” (“je to blbý”) she said of the cage bed, adding that she did not know why she was placed there. No one had given her any reasons.

She reported that it was a degrading experience. She did not call for help as, “nobody will come anyways”. She said that nobody came to check up on her during the night. She was alone in the cage bed, and there was no one else in the room.

Long-lasting impact of being caged

MDAC also conducted an interview via Skype with a person who had been detained in a psychiatric hospital in 1993. Although her experience is two decades ago, her description of being inside a cage bed illustrates the long-lasting effects of the trauma: It is a feeling like you were closed as if you were an animal. As if you weren’t a human. They treat you as someone even lower than an animal. You feel like a monkey in a zoo. You feel humiliated. The space of the cage is really small.

I saw the other patient across the room that was there for a really long time, I don’t know how long. She was there all the time. She kept hanging on the cage, pulling it. The aggressive one did it as well. It was a habit on this department, when they were unable to handle any of the aggressive patients; they locked them down into this cage. […]

The worst thing is that they just lock you there and they do not pay attention to you anymore. They just sit, smoke and drink coffee and don’t care [about] the people there and if someone starts to scream really loud, they lock them, or strap them.