Moral disengagement in psychiatric inpatient care for individuals who engage in self-injury: a conceptual framework for understanding staff responses and patient experiences
Jonas Bjärehed, Marlene Bjärehed · 2026
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Description
Jonas Bjärehed and Marlene Bjärehed published a 2026 framework paper on how ward staff may slide away from the moral calls of care for patients who injure themselves. Inpatient care for such patients is a knot: prevent harm, yet respect their will; keep ties, yet meet institutional rules. Staff bear strain and guilt. The wards may feel cold or coercive to those inside them.
The framework takes a theory of the mind: how a person lets himself off a wrong, in eight mechanisms. It maps those mechanisms onto four sites: the act, the agent, the outcome, and the one who bears it. Acts can be renamed as safe, or compared against worse alternatives. Blame can be shifted to the institution, or spread across the team. Harm can be shrunk to a side note. The patient can be reduced to a diagnostic label, or blamed for the burden.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jonas Bjärehed, Marlene Bjärehed |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 47 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |