Often in the latter stages of a person’s life, it may seem necessary to protect them from themselves. This can include the use of various physical and chemical restraints, in order to keep the person from moving in such a way as to injure themselves or someone else. Of course, in other times, it can just be convenient for one person to restrain another person. In those kinds of circumstances, the less kindly and giving aspects of human nature need to be restrained, as opposed to restraining people who are inconvenient to care for. Far too often, a person who has been tasked with taking care of an elderly individual just decides that it would be so much easier to just restrain them, than it would be to do something more respectful and useful. Restraints of any kind should never be used unless not doing so would create a clear and present danger to the geriatric individual.

One popular type of restraint is the most obvious kind – basically tying up the person to be restrained. Using a rope, a belt, or some kind of tape, the abuser ties the geriatric individual to a fixed object such as a bed, or simply ties them up, as disturbing as it sounds, like a mummy’s wrappings. This is more than just cruel and inhumane; it is also illegal in the extreme. Simply tying up a person is somewhere on the order of criminal confinement, and is at the very least a cruel practice. But another way to restrain a person is just as cruel, if more insidious in its application.

That method of restraining a person is via chemical means. In essence, chemically restraining a person involves rendering them unconscious via some kind of drug. While this is a practice that is far from kind or humane, it is practiced far more often than it should be. In some limited occasions, it may be a reasonable way to keep a geriatric individual from causing him or herself harm. But in most circumstances, it is nothing more than abuse. The law forbids such things.