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Mental Abuse

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Mental Abuse
Workers in mental institutes tended to be abusive to patients. This has a lot to do with the fact that they weren’t properly trained to be with people with mental disabilities that could get violent because they have no control. In the worker’s defense, to them, the best idea to hold back the patient’s violent bouts was with restraints and physical abuse. This has not changed from the past due to the use of straitjackets and drugs to subdue patients, although, that does not excuse these workers for their crimes. In fact, it makes it worse because they know that the people admitted are vulnerable and they are using that to their advantage. Often when women are admitted and then get out they reveal that they were raped by a worker during their …show more content…
“A mental health patient has described how she was raped up to 60 times by a care worker” (Turvill). Often women or even men don’t admit to being abused and the abusers are allowed to roam free. Not only are they physically abused but mentally abused for they tell the patients things that they want to hear like that they are their only way out. They are also given awards for not saying anything like chocolate as the woman in the Daily Mail article explained. The lack of respect some of the workers have make it seem that there needs to be a better way to determine if someone can actually work in mental institutes, especially because of the stigma and bias against the mentally ill. In a book titled Stigma and Mental Illness edited by Paul Jay Fink, M.D. and Allan Tasman, they describe various topics among the stigma of mental illness and the stories of the people who have had to deal with it. In the fourth chapter it describes a woman’s story, Esso Leete, of having schizophrenia and dealing with the various hardships she faces and she states “When it was my word against someone else’s, a someone with no history of mental illness, I had no credibility” when talking of how the workers at an institutes treatment towards her (Fink and Tasman). It is about time that we depart from such views and make sure workers are able to properly care for the vulnerable who have targets stuck on their backs for things they cannot

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