A New Perspective on Human Rights in the Use of Physical Restraint on Psychiatric Patients-Based on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Body

Younjae Oh
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Younjae Oh: College of Nursing, Research Institute of Nursing Science, Hallym University, Hallymdaehakgil 1, Chuncheon 24252, Gangwon-do, Korea

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 19, 1-10

Abstract: (1) Background: Physical restraint in psychiatric settings must be determined by health care professionals for ensuring their patients’ safety. However, when a patient cannot participate in the process of deciding what occurs in their own body, can they even be considered as a personal self who lives in and experiences the lifeworld? The purpose of this study is to review the existential capability of the body from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to explore ways of promoting human rights in physical restraint. (2) Methods: A philosophical reflection was contemplated regarding notions of the body’s phenomenology. (3) Results: Merleau-Ponty’s body phenomenology can explain bodily phenomena as a source of the personal subject, who perceives and acts in the world, and not as a body alienated from the subject in health and illness. Patients, when they are physically restrained, cannot be the self as a subject because their body loses its subjecthood. They are entirely objectified, becoming objects of diagnosis, protection, and control, according to the treatment principles of health care professionals. (4) Conclusions: The foundation of human rights, human being’s dignity lies in the health professionals’ genuine understanding and response to the existential crisis of the patient’s body in relation to its surrounding environment.

Keywords: human rights; physical restraints; mental health; Merleau-Ponty; phenomenology of the body (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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