Interpersonal Aspects of Psychiatric Hospitalization

Abstract

Introduction Patients have various reasons for seeking psychiatric care in a hospital setting. In this paper we direct our attention to 1 phase of this complex problem: the interpersonal aspects of hospital admission. By this we mean to suggest that just as hospitalization may affect a number of people who are emotionally close to the patient, so may these same people have influenced the patient2s coming to the hospital. We further take it as our hypothesis that a study of the steps leading to admission will be diagnostically and therapeutically useful to the clinician. We became interested in this question when it was noted that the psychiatric residents tended to overlook quite completely the importance of certain admission data. To help ascertain the extent to which factors surrounding the admission of patients had or had not been explored, written summaries of discharged patients were reviewed