Community Tenure Following Emergency Discharge

An emergency situation brought about the release of a large number of chronic patients from a state psychiatric hospital. The authors studied a random sample of these patients to determine how many remained out of the hospital when the emergency was over and what differences there were between these patients and those who returned. Twenty-eight percent of all patients remained out for at least four weeks, and 29 percent of the study sample were out at six months. The authors found no essential difference in psychopathology between the two groups, but those who remained out had some useful function in the caretaker family and did not interfere with the family's routine; they were also more likely to be from poorer families.