Interpersonal Aspects of Psychiatric Hospitalization

Abstract

The current interest in various psychiatric hospital treatments is widespread and vigorous among professional groups and the lay public at large. Day and night hospitals, short-term hospitalizations, the hospital's open door, new approaches to psychotherapy, and, of course tranquilizing agents have established for themselves a share of the psychiatric publicity. State and federal public health agencies and hospital study groups have focused on the immense problem of psychiatric hospitalization largely in terms of studying statistics of admissions, hospital stay, and discharge. A substantial body of literature has begun to develop in this connection. However, it is difficult to compare one study with another because of the differences in the purposes and methods of the studies.^1-5One of the important questions that continues to assert itself at various points in most of these studies is some aspect of how to understand and evaluate the relative