designed the review, supervised its conduct, performed reliability checks, identified additional papers, extracted data from primary sources, methodologically rated the studies and wrote the review. Gareth Owen wrote much of chapter 2 and was responsible for performing the searches and conducting the initial systematic review, identifying relevant papers, extracting information, quality assessing studies and summarising their findings. Matthew Hotopf and Swaran Singh contributed to the design of the review and commented on drafts. This work was undertaken by the Institute of Psychiatry who received funding from the Department of Health. This publication presents the findings from a systematic review of existing studies on Community Treatment Orders. The conclusions are based on a thorough analysis of this literature and do not necessarily express the views of the Department of Health.