The judgment formation of agitation: Anthropological insights from a clinical situation in a French Psychiatric Hospital

Abstract

Background

Coercion is no longer a valuable practice to convey good care in French psychiatry. However, the paradoxical consequence of this new consensus is to lock psychiatric practice into a double bind: psychiatric coercion is judged as an “abuse of power” and for its “permissiveness”.

Aims

To analyze this moral anomaly by describing the concrete practice of coercion and its justifications in psychiatry as a solution to the clinical problem of agitation.

Methods

From a medical anthropology perspective on coercion practices in psychiatric hospitals, describe and compare what psychiatrists do and why.

Results

A brief description of a case shows the concrete problem of psychomotor agitation, and its clinical judgment leads to a typology of customary ways of justifying coercion.

Conclusions

The category of violence blurs the clinical meaning of psychomotor agitation as much as it does the practice of physical restraint in psychiatry.