For more than a decade, officials at Bridgewater State Hospital have been promising to cut down on the increasingly discredited practice of restraining mentally ill men, strapping their wrists and ankles to a bed, or isolating them in small cells for days or even weeks at a time.
But statistics provided to the Globe show that the state’s most secure psychiatric facility actually increased its reliance on restraints and isolation over the past decade, even after a Bridgewater patient died in 2009 while being restrained and other mental health facilities have moved decisively away from those tactics.