Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The "Chronic" Mental Hospital Patient

1983; American Psychiatric Association; Volume: 34; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1176/ps.34.7.611

1557-9700

Carl A. Taube, James Westfall Thompson, Marilyn J. Rosenstein, Beatrice M. Rosen, Howard H. Goldman,

Healthcare Policy and Management

The rapid decrease in the resident population of state hospitals over the last decade has engendered a debate over the future role of the state hospital in the overall mental health services system. The authors report on a 1979 study of more than 2,000 state hospital patients designed to evaluate the characteristics of the current hospital population. Their findings document the existence of a new long-stay population that in many ways is similar to the old long-stay population that existed before deinstitutionalization. Continued hospitalization of the new population of long-stay patients, who now are younger than the old long-stay patient group, could cost more than $500 million dollars a year. The authors discuss the difficulty in predicting future trends from the existing data and outline four areas for future research.