Dimensions of the Therapeutic Milieu: A Study of Mental Hospital Atmosphere

Even though the environment of a mental hospital exerts a direct effect on the patient and even though evaluations of mental hospital performance take place constantly in the political arena, mental health professionals remain basically ignorant of how to measure or conceptualize a beneficial treatment environment. This paper is an attempt to extend the methodology for studying the “atmosphere” of mental hospitals through the use of objective indices of hospital performance and factor analysis. Applying this technique to 41 Veterans Administration psychiatric hospitals, the author identifies four factors and discusses their relationship to the objective characteristics of the hospitals.