Here is some promotional information about a show that will be shown on NHK in Japan, in Japanese.  Some of the English may be understandable if you listen carefully behind the Japanese over-voicing.  So if you can get access to NHK or know somebody who does, please tune in!

Japanese time:

Tuesday 18 June 8  8:00-8:29 PM

Tuesday  25 June 1:05-1:34 PM NHK

Two years ago, New Zealander Kelly Savage went through a brief psychotic crisis in Japan.  He was immediately strapped to a bed, standard practice in psychiatric hospitals.  Immobilised for ten days, he suffered cardiopulmonary arrest, likely from DVT - deep vein thrombosis, commonly known as Economy Class Syndrome.  Comatose, Kelly was transferred to a general hospital where his heart restarted 45 minutes after he was found unconscious.  His heart finally gave out a week later.  The psychiatric hospital denies any responsibility for Kelly's demise - “He didn’t die here”.  

In the past, problems in Japan’s 1,200 private psychiatric hospitals were kept in the shadows, in part because of “shame” connected to the social stigma of mental illness.  Kelly’s family has committed itself to ensuring that their personal tragedy leads to change.  If theirs were an isolated event, it could be brushed off as an anomaly.   But there are some 350,000 beds in Japan’s mental hospitals, filled close to capacity.  With a low staff-to-patient ratio, government statistics show that more than 10,000 people are mechanically restrained on a given day and another 10,000 are locked in isolation.  In addition to negative effects this has on patients’ physical and mental health, the occurrence of deaths directly related to mechanical restraint is starting to come to light.

Kyorin University professor Toshio Hasegawa is an expert in the dangers of mechanical restraint.  He decided to visit New Zealand, where Kelly had been hospitalised for depression four years earlier, to investigate best practices in the mental health sphere there.  NHK was with him.  Starting in the 1970s all psychiatric hospitals were closed down, replaced by small “mental health recovery units” in public hospitals for acute cases.  90% of patients are now treated in local community facilities, including peer-run services.  Strapping to beds was eliminated long before WWII, and even physically holding a patient more than a few minutes is regarded as a “failure of service”.  De-escalation techniques have proven effective in reducing incidents of seclusion and restraint.

The difference between mental health care treatment and “mistreatment” becomes clear when comparing attitudes, policies and practices in New Zealand and Japan.  It would be fair to conclude that had Kelly gone through his second crisis in New Zealand, he would be alive today.