There is too little space, too few nurses and a lot of violence in clinics for mentally ill people.
This is shown by research from BuzzFeed News.
By Carolin Haentjes and Antonia Märzhäuser
It is an isolated world from which hardly anything penetrates the outside world: the penal system, i.e. the placement of mentally ill and addicts in forensic clinics.
The conditions behind the clinic walls are rarely discussed.
But a month-long research by BuzzFeed News Germany * now shows: According to the research, more than 13,000 people in Germany are currently housed in 78 correctional clinics - more than ever before.
The clinics are overcrowded in nine federal states, and capacity has been reached in two more.
This emerges from inquiries to all 16 federal states.
Doctors and therapists report that treatments are often canceled and performed by insufficiently qualified staff.
Patients are quartered in isolation rooms that should actually remain free for emergencies, rooms are overcrowded.
Often there is violence and coercion.
Employees report that they cannot de-escalate dangerous situations because of a lack of staff.
Some federal states have managed to organize psychiatric accommodation comparatively well, in others the situation threatens to escalate.
It looks particularly tricky in North Rhine-Westphalia, for example: there are around 1,000 planned beds too few.
In Lower Saxony, 120 people are waiting for a place in the penal system, most of them in freedom.
From the point of view of the Lower Saxony Association of Judges, "this harbors considerable dangers for society", it says on request - because the mentally ill or addicts remain free and could commit further crimes there.
Several federal states complain about overcrowding on request.
From the Ministry of Justice of Saxony-Anhalt it is said that the permanently high occupancy situation has worsened extremely in 2020, NRW writes of "capacity bottlenecks", Bavaria of "strong occupancy pressure".
Bureaucratic jargon for: We have a problem.
“There were phases in rooms intended for one person, occupied by two people.
When the occupancy situation was very tense, visitor and crisis rooms were temporarily occupied, ”writes the Brandenburg ministry.
In Rhineland-Palatinate, three patients repeatedly came to rooms intended for two people.
And in Bremen, patients slept in reserve beds, observation rooms or other wards.
But not only is there a lack of beds, there is also a lack of nursing staff.
"The more restrictive the conditions, the more often it bangs," says Gisela Neunhöffer from the United Services Union Verdi.
“The stress then also increases sick leave.” It is not known how many specialist staff are missing.
Most federal states don't even have clear rules about how many staff should be responsible for how many patients.
This research was funded with a scholarship from the network research.
For a detailed version of this research on conditions in forensic clinics, visit BuzzFeed News *.
You can reach the research team at recherche@buzzfeed.de.
* BuzzFeed News is part of the Ippen-Digital network
