The Relation of Staff Consensus to Patient Disturbance on Mental Hospital Wards

Abstract

In 1949 Stanton and Schwartz first published their hypothesis that episodes of disagreement among staff tend to precipitate and maintain episodes of increased pathological excitement, dissociation, withdrawal, incontinence, or otherwise disturbed behavior among hospitalized mental patients, and that resolution of the disagreement is regularly followed by reduction of such disturbances.1 Dissociation, for instance, is described as reflection of, and a mode of participation in, a social field which itself is seriously split. . 2 Stanton and Schwartz expressed this hypothesis in several forms, however, leaving its parameters somewhat uncertain; they did not rigidly specify the kinds of disturbance, the types of patients, and the processes of agreement and disagreement to which the hypothesis might apply. More particularly, the patients