Nurses at psychiatric unit called teens 'pathetic'

Warning: Some readers may find details in this report distressing

Up to five nurses could be involved in physically restraining someone to a bed or the floor if they were a danger to others or themselves.

Guidelines say restraints should only ever be used as a last resort, when all other de-escalation tactics have been exhausted.

Cara, now 21, would sometimes have to be restrained to prevent her from self-harming but says most of her restraints could have been avoided if staff had first attempted to speak to her instead of using restraints "as a first port of call".

She said one restraint in 2021 left her bruised and shaken.

"He held me down by the neck to the floor," Cara said.

"Quite scary, to have this man hovering over you, holding you down. His handprint was left around my neck."

On another occasion, Cara's medical notes reveal, she felt she had been assaulted after being pushed to the floor by the same nurse.

Cara had asked to call the police, only to later change her mind.

She told Disclosure this was because she was scared of the outcome.

"I just thought they might treat me worse than they already were," she said.

When Jenna, from Inverness, was 16, she was suffering with depression, an eating disorder and had started to self-harm.

The nearest adolescent psychiatric unit was in Dundee but there were no beds and she was sent to Skye House.

"It was hell, like a prison kind of environment," Jenna said.

Jenna spent about nine months in the unit.

She was treated for anorexia by being fed through a nasogastric (NG) tube, a common but invasive treatment for malnourished people which involves threading a tube through the nose into the stomach.

Sometimes she would be restrained for this but she says the way staff administered this treatment has left her traumatised.

"Sometimes they would just come up to me and grab my arms and take me away," she said.

"I would just be dragged by however many nurses was needed."

She said sometimes staff would be so rough with her she'd be left bleeding and bruised.

"It was a kind of subtle punishment to teach me a lesson."

Abby is autistic and was admitted to Skye House at the age of 14 when she was self-harming and suicidal.

She was there for two and half years and says she felt bullied by staff, some of whom could be verbally abusive.

On one occasion, she said she was mocked for self-harming.

"The nurse came up to me and almost chuckled, like a kind of grin, and said 'You're being pathetic, like look at yourself'," Abby said.

"It felt like bullying sometimes. To the point where I just wanted to hurt myself.

"It felt true to me that if other people are seeing me as pathetic, I am pathetic."

Abby and her family believe she was over-medicated in Skye House.

She said: "A lot of the patients were like walking zombies, me included.

"Like a lot of the time we were just sedated to the point where I guess our personalities were dimmed."

Jenna said staff would over-use intramuscular sedative injections when patients were in distress.

Emergency medication should only be given as a last resort.

Jenna said: "Without kind of trying to talk to me first, or calm me down, they would just go straight to giving an [injection].

"I think to be honest it was so that they could have an easier shift whilst all their patients were kind of sedated."

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