The relationship between legal status and patient characteristics in state hospitals
- 1 October 1986
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Psychiatric Association Publishing in American Journal of Psychiatry
- Vol. 143 (10) , 1233-1237
- https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.143.10.1233
Abstract
Concerns raised in response to proposals that general hospitals admit patients who currently receive acute care in state hospitals have focused primarily on certain assumptions about the characteristics of involuntary patients in contrast to their involuntary counterparts. The author compared a group of voluntary and involuntary patients in seven state hospitals. Contrary to some recent reports, legal status was not associated with chronicity, prevalence of psychosis, extent of social ties as measured by marital status and living situation, or need for seclusion or restraint. The two groups different significantly in median length of stay but in an opposite direction from that previously reported.This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:
- Behavioral precipitants to civil commitmentAmerican Journal of Psychiatry, 1983
- Patterns of SeclusionJournal of Nervous & Mental Disease, 1981
- The prediction of dangerous behavior in emergency civil committmentAmerican Journal of Psychiatry, 1980