Advancing Safety and Reducing Coercion in Psychiatric Nursing: Evidence, Education, and Innovation

Dear Colleagues,

Coercive practices and safety remain among the most complex issues in psychiatric care. Across inpatient, community, forensic, and emergency settings, mental health nurses are central to assessing and managing aggression, self-harm, suicide risk, absconding, and behavioral crises. They also contribute to decisions concerning ward rules, locked-door policies, restraint, seclusion, involuntary treatment, and security technologies. These decisions require nurses to balance patient and staff protection with human rights and recovery-oriented care. The central challenge is how to maintain safety without normalizing coercion or undermining the therapeutic purpose of psychiatric care. This Special Issue focuses on coercive practices and safety in psychiatric settings. It will examine the interventions employed and the clinical, ethical, relational, professional, and organizational processes through which they are selected, justified, implemented, experienced, challenged, and reduced. Areas of interest include the prevalence, determinants, consequences, measurement, and reduction of coercive practices; least-restrictive alternatives, including de-escalation and open-door policies; and the relationships among workplace violence, staff responses, therapeutic relationships, staff well-being, and recourse to coercion. The Special Issue also welcomes research on mechanisms shaping safety-related practice, including clinical judgment, ethical reasoning, attitudes toward coercion and safety, staffing, leadership, ward rules, safety cultures, and institutional policies. Studies of surveillance systems, alarms, and other security technologies may address their effectiveness, acceptability, implementation, and ethical or organizational implications. Nursing education is relevant where studies examine how undergraduate, postgraduate, and continuing professional pathways shape attitudes, risk assessment, decision-making, and preparedness for least-restrictive practice, or evaluate strategies designed to reduce coercion and strengthen safety competence. We welcome quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, psychometric, and implementation studies, as well as well-conducted reviews, protocols, educational interventions, clinical trials and service evaluations. Contributions should inform psychiatric nursing practice, education, leadership, service organization, or policy and advance safer, less coercive, and ethically responsible mental health care.

Dr. Giuliano Anastasi
Guest Editor

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• psychiatric nursing
• coercive practices
• restrictive interventions
• patient and staff safety
• security technologies
• workplace violence
• professional attitudes
• nursing education
• human rights