The first thing to note is that the vast majority of restraint encounters are in the ED with mostly undifferentiated agitation. That almost always ends up being drugs or medical illness.

Patients who end up in a psychiatric unit, well the vast majority of restraints are for violence towards others not the self.

If you are a reader here and you've been in a psych unit it's probably been for suicidal ideation and it was probably in a cushy unit. The majority of inpatient psych work involves violent criminals, drug users, and the severely mentally ill (ex: schizophrenia, bipolar) - not depression.

An untreated manic episode prior to modern medical care had a 20-25 percent fatality rate due to getting themselves killed in one way or another.

Even if we gave up on the suicidal it really wouldn't solve the problem.

Protecting other people from the crazy and foul tempered is important.

Context

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

Throwaway05 6d ago

I would really like to talk to a non-woke doctor from say Germany about how that stuff goes.

I'd suspect that this side of things wouldn't be as bad as you think since shit hole countries may have a tendency to just kill or lock away forever patients with serious mental illness or drug use.

Baseline criminality and poor understanding of Western cultural norms is more of a traditional police problem and dodges (some of) these tensions.