Contemplative Intervention Reduces Physical Interventions for Children in Residential Psychiatric Treatment.
Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research February 1, 2017 Joshua C Felver, Richard H. Jones, Matthew A Killam et al.
A manualized contemplative intervention called Mindful Life: Schools (MLS) was tested with ten children receiving intensive residential psychiatric care. Over one month, children attended 12 sessions of 30-45 minutes. Facility data on seclusions and restraints showed that in the 24 hours after an MLS class, children had significantly lower odds of requiring physical intervention (odds ratio 0.3; 95% CI 0.2, 0.5). Behavioral questionnaires did not show significant effects, and the program was generally acceptable. The findings suggest contemplative practices can acutely reduce the use of physical interventions, and objective measures like incident rates may be more informative than subjective reports.