Job hazard

I have serious concerns about the use of tazers on psychotic patients. I question their effectiveness on irrational agitated people and their safety. When ineffective, security tends to repeatedly tazer people and many of the deaths have been people on psych drugs (many can cause cardiac conduction problems) who get tazered repeatedly. This area has not been adequately researched.

I am also worried that the availability of the tazer may result in it’s use in patients previously managed by verbal intervention or restraints that doesn’t require electric shock.

I don’t think they should be outlawed entirely, but lets face it, electric shock is a form of torture, and torture is not an effective treatment of psychotic agitation. We had a couple of deputies whose full time job it was to pick and deliver pateints on whom commitment proceeding had been initiated. I got to see them at work and their ability to talk people down and gain the cooperation of agitated patients was phenomenal–it was just a matter of temperament and 30 years of experience.

Or that the type of force was misdirected rather than being an insufficient level–i.e. an appropriate type but insufficient level for a violent sociopath, but destined to fail for a psychotic patient not responsive to punishment–which is all a baton is up to the point of unconsciousness.

The typical law enforcement mentality is badly misplaced when dealing with psychotic persons. The very procedures that they fall back on, developed in dealing with the bad, often misfire when applied to the mad. A well known example applied to a collective rather than an individual was the Branch Dividian catastrophe. The FBI continued to insist, over the objection of their psychiatric advisors on increasing pressure, which only made the paraoids more paranoid, confirming their apocolytic paranoid beliefs.

Whether the guy is ‘bad’ or ‘mad’ is irrelevant from the standpoint that he poses a grave and immenent danger to those around him. Anon 11:17 is wrong when considering ‘electric shock is a form of torture’. Torture is a practice of inflicting physical or emotional pain or stress to achieve a behavior change. Torture is recognized by the intentions of the individual performing the actions, not the actions taken necessarily. The electrophysiologist using painful electrical stimulation of the nervous system is not torturing the patient in whom he is attempting to diagnose a medical condition. The same devise used at the same settings utilized with the intent to subjugate rather than diagnose or treat then becomes torture; defined by the intent rather than the technique applied.

In this case the patient was being zapped with electricity in order to prevent the necessity of the officer from more directly exposing himself, the patient and the medical staff to greater harm compared to the situation where brute physical force would be required. Talking the patient down is a nice idea, but in the heat of the moment, the police have to make a difficult decision to prevent the greater harm.

If a mad man charges me with a knife I hope the police aren’t too judicious in their use of force to protect me.