Who Are the “Committed?”

Abstract

In 1977, Herjanic et al. (Tomelleri, C.J., Lakshminarayanan, N., and Herjanic, M. Who are the "committed?" J. Nerv. Ment. Dist., 165: 288-293, 1977) described all patients court committed to an acute urban mental health facility in St. Louis, Missouri, from July 1, 1973 to June 30, 1975. On January 2, 1979, major revisions in the civil commitment statutes of the state of Missouri went into effect. By the same method and at the same mental health center, this study describes all patients who reached the stage of a court hearing from July 1, 1980 to June 30, 1982 under the new civil commitment law. The following observations are made: a) 4 per cent of the total population of admitted patients reached the stage of a court hearing under the old civil commitment law but only 2.4 per cent reached the same stage under the new civil commitment law; b) only 3 per cent of the petitions for commitment were rejected by the probate court under the old civil commitment law in contrast to 30 per cent under the new civil commitment law; c) among court-committed patients only, the mean length of hospitalization decreased from 122 days under the old civil commitment law to 51 days under the new civil commitment law; and d) the proportion of committed patients requiring readmission increased from 22 per cent under the old civil commitment law to 50 per cent under the new civil commitment law. In this study, 595 hospitalizations were reviewed.