Tied and locked: The patient who died in the fire at the psychiatry in Lovech, Bulgaria was in the isolation ward

This is the third such incident since the beginning of the year - are the institutions reacting?

by Maria Cherneva 20:31, 12/10/2023

The patient who died in the fire at the psychiatry in Lovech at the beginning of the month was locked in an isolator and could not escape. This is the third incident since the beginning of the year in which mentally ill patients have lost their lives in a hospital fire.

An open letter from the Global Initiative in Psychiatry to the Attorney General and the Ombudsman calls for an objective and impartial investigation not only of the tragedy in Lovech, but also of the vicious practices of tying up patients as punitive measures.

10 days after the fire, the patients and staff have not yet been interviewed, the cameras have not been removed. Only two expertises have been appointed - forensic and electrical. Despite BNT's inquiries, the Ministry of Health has not responded to the case.

His name was Georgi, he was 25 years old. Had it been taken a week before the accident, the acute phase of the disease should have passed. But still he was tied up and locked in the isolation ward. The fire started right there, behind that window. Tied up, the boy had no chance. Patients in the same ward can still hear his screams.

Patient - Because I am in a room next to him and I heard him screaming and shouting - "Burning, burning".

BNT: And he couldn't get out?

Patient - Yes, because he is locked and tied.

"I heard the alarm screeching and I saw the boy - he was shouting 'Fire, fire', he was tied up. And I tried to open the door, but it was locked."

Devastated, those from Georgi's ward are deeply dejected, now they are afraid that they too may be locked up. It happened all the time if they were not "obedient".

Confinement and tying up can cause serious damage to the psyche, and therefore there is an express regulation that defines the conditions for this extreme measure. And even without an investigation, it is clear that they are violated. Because if there was constant monitoring by a nurse, Georgi would have been taken out.

According to the head of the department, Dr. Katya Edreva, the incident happened in the short interval when the shifts overlapped, but this does not cancel their duties at all. In addition to continuous monitoring, the regulation also requires the presence of the doctor who prescribed the measure. The doctor must also have good reason to resort to shackling and seclusion.

"For me, the main problem is whether there were really medical indications for performing such a procedure. A person should really be in a state of excitement, which would put his life and the lives of others in danger, and according to our information, this is not the case." said Kalina Ivanova - Global Initiative in Psychiatry.

"That's exactly how they describe him - meek, calm, not the first time he's been lying down. He's about to be discharged," explained a psychiatric social worker.

However, according to the patients, something provoked Georgi's more aggressive behavior. That's why he was punished.

"The first reaction is the paramedic and he decides de facto. Paramedics and nurses are more than doctors," explained another social worker.

Aggressive behavior is to be expected from people with mental illness and psychiatry should know best how to respond or how not to provoke it. And in fact, the conditions in the hospital itself do not support this process.

"The whole environment is provoking conflicts and tension between the patients, and if a dispute and quarrel has arisen between two patients, this is the easiest way for the staff to bring order to a total institution," comments Kalina Ivanova.

But the ordinance, like all international standards, prohibits solitary confinement and shackling as punishment. Similar behavior has been registered more than once by the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, which, after repeated reports to the authorities, finally disclosed its terrifying observations in psychiatric hospitals in our country. Binding and isolation as systemic are constantly emerging from judicial practice.

"Cases of unjustified use of these harshest measures to limit a person's freedom by tying, immobilizing, is common and violations are frequent. I have had a case of severe injuries that were caused to a person while he was isolated, including case when the person is punished by tying up," explained Vladislava Tsarigradska - judge.

Due to the number of similar incidents, the Global Initiative in Psychiatry believes that George's death can also be covered up. That is why they are publicly demanding an objective investigation. A photo of the insulator or soft room before the fire can be found on the Internet. To secure it, money was collected from charity.

"Similar practices like the one that we suspect is practiced in this hospital lead to horrific incidents. And we think that this is absolutely unacceptable," explained Kalina Ivanova.

What does it mean to burn alive?

"For me, this case is another proof of the systemic problems that the Bulgarian state has. They have been commented on, including publicly, which is very rare and an exception. We for the cooperation mechanism, on the basis of which the communication between the committee for the prevention of torture and the member states, namely in the conditions of exception vis-à-vis the Bulgarian state. Public statements were made twice, one of which is a precedent in general in the committee's practice - to make a public statement against a state about the state of its psychiatry, and unfortunately it is the Bulgarian state," said judge Vladislava Tsarigradska.

Many of us observed this firsthand during the two-plus years of organizing and mobilizing the Cops Off Campus movement within the statewide University of California system and across North Amerika. Many of the academics—included those tenured and relatively financially secure—who publish, teach, tweet, post, and eagerly broadcast their critiques of state violence and policing were nowhere to be found when it came to supporting what i considered to be a relatively modest, contained attempt to confront campus police departments and their long histories of repression and profiling. This absence was unsurprising, but no less disappointing and enraging.

Don’t get it twisted: i’m not throwing this criticism out there with some projected threshold of “authentic” participation from these people—i’m saying that the academics i have in mind were wholly absent. Zero. These people know who they are. You know who you are. They ghosted the whole thing and wanted nothing to do with the collective work of confronting police violence on their own campuses. It was their loss, because this period of campus-based organizing and collaboration built and strengthened a continuum of relationships between scholars who were actively exceeding and contributing to the obsolescence of the “academic” position.

Fan audiobook of Angela Y. Davis' Are Prisons Obsolete?

Ultimately, this “generous offer” amounted to turning the West Bank into non-contiguous cantons, crisscrossed by a network of settlements, roads and Israeli areas. Even the supposed “capital” of the Palestinian state would mostly be under Israeli control, with stipulations and conditions that stripped any real sovereignty from any area of the supposed Palestinian “state”. Not even the sky above Palestinian heads would be under their control, nor the water under their feet, as Israel still demanded access to water resources under the West Bank.

From abolitionist.tools

As demands to divest from policing and invest in non-police community-based and accountable safety strategies have become the subject of broader discussion, several organizing campaigns have expanded defund demands to include courts, prosecutors' offices, and other machinery of the criminal punishment system.

In this workshop, hosted by Community Justice Exchange, Interrupting Criminalization, and Critical Resistance, we explore why the abolition of the prison-industrial complex necessarily requires abolition of the criminal court system. Together, we’ll learn how criminal courts serve as the machinery of prosecution, punishment, and surveillance, feeding people into prisons, probation, and other forms of surveillance and control. We’ll discuss the interventions organizers and community members are already making to shift and build power while criminal courts still exist, like reforming bail and pre-trial detention policies. We’ll present the reformist detours to avoid that serve to only move us farther away from abolition - like campaigns to elect and defend "progressive prosecutors," and calls for the establishment and expansion of court-based diversion programs - while highlighting the organizing campaigns and interventions that might get us closer.

If the use of human shields was so wide as to cause hundreds upon hundreds of dead Palestinian civilians, then surely there would be a reporter or an observer on the ground that could have caught a whiff of it. But reporters on the ground could find no trace of such a supposedly widespread action, Jeremy Bowen of the BBC wrote that he found no evidence of the use of human shields while he was covering the assault on Gaza. Similarly, Kim Sengupta writing for the Belfast Telegraph interviewed Palestinians in Gaza and unsurprisingly came to a similar conclusion: Hamas was not forcing anybody to be a human shield, counter to Netanyahu’s claims.

But perhaps these reporters were missing something, let us consult an organization which specializes in these matters. Fortunately for us, Amnesty international released a detailed report of its investigation into the matter. In their report they indicate that:

“The Israeli authorities have claimed that in a few incidents, the Hamas authorities or Palestinian fighters directed or physically coerced individual civilians in specific locations to shield combatants or military objectives. Amnesty International has not been able to corroborate the facts in any of these cases.”

So, it seems that the Israeli claims have no basis in reality, and are just a way to demonize Palestinians and legitimize their indiscriminate bombardment of civilians. This is hardly the first time Israel has used this accusation to delegitimize their enemies. For example, in the 2006 war against Lebanon Israel accused Hizballah of using human shields. Unsurprisingly, investigations by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch similarly found no evidence.

Long-time prison abolitionist Jacques Lesage de La Haye reflects on decades of anti-prison organizing in France and his personal journey from inmate to activist.

Winning proposal:

Once Derek Chauvin has been found guilty in a court of law, he is sentenced to a term of community service of a length and type appropriate to the severity of his crime. (So in this case, a lot. Life?) That community service is overseen by agents of the court; I’m thinking more like lawyers or clerks, less like armed bailiffs. Those agents are not charged with forcing him to stick to the community service, but rather just observing whether he does so.

If he forfeits on his community service, as determined by the courts, then he will be considered an “outlaw” - meaning, specifically, someone not protected by the law. Anything done to him that would ordinarily constitute a crime no longer does. No police are necessary; if he refuses to serve his time helping his fellow man, then anybody with a chip on their shoulder can punish him for it. As long as he sticks to his sentence, he’s safe, with his life dedicated to helping others. And if anyone were to commit a crime against him while he was in that situation they would face the same fate he currently faces—an appropriate community service sentence enforced by the threat of being put outside of the protection of the law should he violate that sentence.

Obviously, it’s crucial that the courts are seen as impartial and unimpeachable, since they don’t have a bunch of men with guns to enforce their will. But it’s the best I’ve got. Derek broke the social contract; either he makes amends or we’ll put him outside of the protection of that social contract. Simple as that.

Excerpt:

At the end of June 2023, the Israel Prison Service (IPS) was holding 147 Palestinian minors in detention or in prison on what it defined “security” grounds. At that time, the IPS was also holding 26 Palestinian minors for being in Israel illegally.

At the end of 2020, the IPS adopted a new policy and stopped providing B'Tselem with the requested figures. Instead, it has since published some data on the IPS website every three months. The first year this occurred (July 2020 through September 2021), the figures published were partial and therefore are not included here.

Relying on state violence to curb domestic violence only ends up harming the most marginalized women.

This carceral variant of feminism continues to be the predominant form. While its adherents would likely reject the descriptor, carceral feminism describes an approach that sees increased policing, prosecution, and imprisonment as the primary solution to violence against women.

Carceral feminists have said little about law-enforcement violence and the overwhelming number of survivors behind bars. Similarly, many groups organizing against mass incarceration often fail to address violence against women, often focusing exclusively on men in prison. But others, especially women of color activists, scholars, and organizers, have been speaking out.

By relying solely on a criminalized response, carceral feminism fails to address these social and economic inequities, let alone advocate for policies that ensure women are not economically dependent on abusive partners. Carceral feminism fails to address the myriad forms of violence faced by women, including police violence and mass incarceration. It fails to address factors that exacerbate abuse, such as male entitlement, economic inequality, the lack of safe and affordable housing, and the absence of other resources.

Carceral feminism abets the growth of the state’s worst functions, while obscuring the shrinking of its best. At the same time, it conveniently ignores the anti-violence efforts and organizing by those who have always known that criminalized responses pose further threats rather than promises of safety.

The short war which Azerbaijan waged against Armenian-populated Karabakh after a months-long blocade is over (Armenian separatists lost, and will likely get ethnically cleansed out of the region)...

...but in the aftermath, it's worth pointing out that several high-profile Azeris did speak against their government starting a war - and were repressed.

The most worrisome case is the chairman of the confederation of trade unions, Afiaddin Mammadov. A provocateur who had previously injured himself threw a knife at him, and cops arrested him immediately after that, claiming he had injured the provocateur.

Excerpt:

The two fatalities are among a growing list of young people dying inside Minnesota’s correctional facilities this year – another young man, Oscar D. Rodriguez-Corona, 21, was found dead inside Hennepin County Jail on September 18.

Rivera-Coba’s death is being investigated by the Sherburne County Sheriff’s Office. However, nearly two months after he died, the county hasn’t received the toxicology or autopsy reports from the Midwest Medical Examiner’s Office.

Rivera-Coba’s family and advocates gathered outside Anoka County Jail on August 10 demanding answers to his death and an investigation into the jail.