When Psychiatric Services Become a Waiting Room: Situational Analysis of Involuntary Commitment and Treatment as Experienced by Patients and Nurses

A growing body of literature highlights the involvement of nurses in the application of involuntary commitment and treatments in psychiatry. The violence underlying these coercive practices is often discussed, as they infringe on human rights and have negative effects on both patients and healthcare staff. The current state of knowledge on this subject, however, fails to inform us of what characterizes and influences these practices in psychiatric nursing. A situational analysis was conducted to gain a better understanding of this issue. This qualitative research aims to explore the characteristics of nursing care during involuntary commitment and treatments. In all, 10 nurses ( n = 10) and 11 patients ( n = 11) participated in semi-structured interviews and completed a sociodemographic questionnaire. Data analysis followed a grounded theory approach, involving a process of coding, conceptualizing, categorizing, constant comparison, and relational mapping, accompanied by analytical memos. Four conceptual categories emerged from data analysis: (1) Psychiatry as a waiting room, (2) nurses as subordinates, (3) nothing else but medication, and (4) resisting undignifying care. The results suggest that clinical issues surrounding involuntary commitment and treatments can be explained by how care is conceived. The psychiatric nursing practice seems to be limited to the application of coercive power, such as forced administration of medication. The distress potentially induced by involuntary commitment and treatments in patients comes to be ignored in favor of compliance with the legal procedures. The results describe a situation where patients felt abandoned to those procedures as if refusing to be hospitalized or treated were incompatible with any other form of care. Several participants also report having suffered negative consequences following one or more coerced psychiatric episodes. For them, refusal of care therefore seems to be associated with a resistance against the current violence of biomedical psychiatry, rather than a refusal to obtain help and support.