A Thirty-Year Retrospective Study of Hospitalization among Severely Mentally III Patients

Abstract

This study examines the effects of deinstitutionalization policies on psychiatric hospitalization rates over a thirty-year period. It is based on a retrospective study of successive hospitalizations in severely disabled patients. The data indicate that in any five-year period these patients still spend over 20% of their time in hospital. For patients who have stayed for a total of more than one year every five years in hospital, the average length of stay has been decreasing far less rapidly in the last fifteen years than it had previously. Patients who were first admitted after 1971 spent proportionally as much time in hospital as those whose first stay was earlier. These results show that the groups primarily affected by deinstitutionalization are those who were first hospitalized prior to the 1970s and those who are the heaviest hospital users. However, the data from the patients admitted since the seventies seem to reveal that the process of change may have reached its limits.

Factors affecting the success of community placement: the TAPS project 26

“…One other long-term study produced a finding of relevance to our data. Mercier et al (1994) conducted a 14-year follow-up of patients discharged from a large psychiatric hospital in Montreal. They divided their sample into shortstay (< 1 year) and long-stay patients.…”

“…For the short-stay group the average length of stay remained about the same. Mercier et al (1994) interpret this as a consequence of the course of psychotic illnesses, patients in the early phase requiring more inpatient care than those in the later phase. This interpretation accords with our finding of a worse outcome for new-long-stay compared with old-long-stay patients and for young individuals.…”