The Impact of Broadened Civil Commitment Laws on Length of Stay in a State Mental Hospital

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s considerable attention was focused on the deleterious effects of prolonged hospitalization for mental illness. Sociologists such as Goffman and clinicians such as Wing identified the psychosocial and clinical processes that led patients to become increasingly dependent on the routine of the hospital and progressively less able to live in the community. Along with this concern came growing criticism of the legal processes by which individuals were committed to and retained in state hospitals and of the procedural protections afforded them.Landmark court decisions such as Lessard v. Schmidt led to sweeping changes in commitment laws across the nation during the 1970s. California's Lanterman-Petris-Short Act served as a model for the laws of many states by narrowing the substantive grounds for commitment and imposing procedural safeguards on the commitment process.