straitjacket

noun

1. A jacketlike garment with very long sleeves which can be secured in place, thus preventing the wearer from moving their arms; often used in psychiatric hospitals to prevent patients from injuring themselves or others.

   “There’s a couple of people actually wearing duct-tape straitjackets.”

2. (figuratively)Any situation seen as confining or restricting.

   “our ever-increasing bureaucratic straitjacket of regulations”

   “[I]f we remain in one discipline, we remain in a straitjacket; an adequate theory of language evolution requires a lot of interdisciplinary work.”

verb

1. (literally, transitive)To put someone into a straitjacket.

   “What he asked himself now was,—could Miss Edge and Miss Baker, in order to get him out of the house, have set Birt onto Elizabeth, be in league with the man to break a poor old fellow down by simply driving his sad girl out of her wits? To have her straitjacketted even, muffled in a padded room?”

2. (broadly, figuratively, transitive)To restrict the freedom of someone or something, either physically or psychologically.

   “Charles for five whole days in a Victorian topper and tailcoat when he practically had to be straitjacketted to get him into tails for a three-hour wedding?”

   “Encouraging, allowing for, and maintaining a plurality of viewpoints concerning public policy, for instance, adaptively (even though partially and incompletely) reduces the chances of a rigidly deterministic and reductionistic mindset maladaptively straitjacketting our abilities to deal with dynamic complexity and to appreciate the benefits of malleability and self-criticality in remaining open to the challenges of our environment.”

   “But it has not always been like this. The last time human remains hit the headlines occurred when the government-sponsored Palmer Report was published. It was deeply antagonistic to research on human remains, and recommended straitjacketing archaeological research within the same framework as medical science.”

   “Where most primates have a respectable pair of grasping rear hands we have two changelings: long arched pads with rounded chins at one end and stumpy thumbs straight-jacketed to baby fingers at the other.”

   “she couldnʼt wait to go to college, have a career and leave her parentsʼ straitjacketed lives behind”