Mental health committal

BACKGROUND: A mental health crisis can create challenges for individuals, families, and communities. This multifaceted issue often involves different professionals from law enforcement and health care systems, which may lead to siloed and suboptimal care. The virtual crisis care (VCC) program was developed to provide rural law enforcement with access to behavioral health professionals and facilitated collaborative care via telehealth technology. OBJECTIVE: This study was designed to evaluate the implementation and use of a VCC program from a telehealth hub for law enforcement in rural areas...

Background: The use of modern board games has been growing past years in education, research, and mental health attendance. Often one professional selects games by his/her criteria depending on his/her objective with them. We evaluated the cognitive processes inherent to each modern board game to obtain a consensus of the cognitive profile of each. We explain how to choose the most suitable board games in future interventions. Materials and Methods: Fifteen education, mental health, and neuroscience research professionals with board games experience participated in an online assessment of 27 modern board games...

INTRODUCTION: In 1992, New Zealand's mental health legislation created the distinct concept of a 'restricted patient' - effectively creating a pathway into forensic patient status, but via the civil committal process, without the patient passing through the criminal justice system en route. This regime was aimed at civilly committed patients who present "special difficulties" because of the danger they pose to others. It remains in force but has attracted little scrutiny. OBJECTIVE: This paper traverses the background to restricted patient status, and the legal regime, before describing and analysing, in anonymous form, the circumstances of all those declared to be restricted patients, and their outcomes, since the regime began...

Upon committal to one of the newly established female convict prisons in the mid-nineteenth century, women entered a system intended to regulate them in body and in mind for the ends of reform. This article interrogates how women's health needs were identified and contested by the prison officials and doctors tasked with their custody and care. It highlights the importance of broader temporal gender beliefs in dictating their treatment in this carceral space and explores how the women themselves exercised agency over the terms of their imprisonment...

AIMS: There is renewed interest in the inverse association between psychiatric hospital and prison places, with reciprocal time trends shown in more than one country. We hypothesised that the numbers of admissions to psychiatric hospitals and committals to prisons in Ireland would also correlate inversely over time (i.e. dynamic measures of admission and committal rather than static, cross-sectional numbers of places). METHOD: Publicly available activity statistics for psychiatric hospitals and prisons in Ireland were collated from 1986 to 2010...

BACKGROUND: Self immolation is a heinous way to commit suicide which is mostly prevalent in individuals who attempt to escape a stressful situation and is considered as a strange and unusual method. OBJECTIVES: This study examined demographic characteristics and mental health in self immolation attempters in the city of Bandar Abbas. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Two groups are involved in this enquiry. A group of 30 participants who have committed self-immolation and the other consisting of 15 non-committers...

Recent scholarship has explored the dynamics between families and colonial lunatic asylums in the late nineteenth century, where families actively participated in the processes of custodial care, committal, treatment and release of their relatives. This paper works in this historical field, but with some methodological and theoretical differences. The Foucauldian study is anchored to a single case and family as an illness narrative that moves cross-referentially between bureaucratic state archival material, psychiatric case records, and intergenerational family-storytelling and family photographs...

BACKGROUND/AIM: The complex multifactorial etiology of suicide suggests the need to consider gender differences when developing effective strategies for suicide prevention. The aim of this study was to examine the suicide rates and/or trends obtained for population as a whole, including gender differences in cases of committed suicide and to consider factors (age groups, education, employment, marital status, nationality and methods) associated with it in Serbia within the period 2006-2010...

OBJECTIVES: To describe the characteristics of suicide and assess the capacity of health services at the district level in Cameroon to deliver quality mental health care. METHODS: The study covered the period between 1999 and 2008 and was carried out in Guidiguis health district which had a population of 145 700 inhabitants in 2008. Data collection was based on psychological autopsy methods. To collect data, we used documentary review of medical archives, semi-structured interviews of relatives of suicide completers, a focus group discussion of health committee members and a survey to consulting nurses working at the primary health care level...

OBJECTIVES: Caregivers (CGs) of older adults have unique and diverse needs for intervention. The present studies describe the characteristics of CGs and caregiving situations and how these relate to CG therapy utilization patterns in a community mental health setting. METHOD: Study 1: Through chart review, the researchers explored service utilization patterns and identified preliminary typologies of Caregiver Family Therapy (CFT) clients, N = 23. Study 2: By conducting a second chart review, the researchers sought to determine whether the categories that emerged in Study 1 applied to a second group of CFT clients, N = 36...

This article argues for the blending of local, national, and transnational perspectives to explore comparative issues relating to asylum developments and provisions in New Zealand. It also aims to highlight some issues preoccupying authorities of the time and in doing so focuses on three key areas that generated comparative comment among medical officials in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: asylum provision and funding, statistics, and forms of committal. These areas were of concern due to claims that insane patients were deliberately being shipped to New Zealand: that the colony had high admission and recovery rates; and that asylums in the colony were overcrowded...

BACKGROUND: The ultra high risk state for psychosis has not been studied in young offender populations. Prison populations have higher rates of psychiatric morbidity and substance use disorders. Due to the age profile of young offenders one would expect to find a high prevalence of individuals with pre-psychotic or ultra-high risk mental states for psychosis (UHR). Accordingly young offender institutions offer an opportunity for early interventions which could result in improved long term mental health, social and legal outcomes...

BACKGROUND: Vulnerable prisoners and mentally disordered offenders who present with risk of harm to self or others were accommodated in Special Observation Cells (SOCs) isolated from others for considerable periods of time. This practice has been criticised by the Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture. The objective of this initiative was to reduce the use of seclusion within the prison and to improve the care of vulnerable and mentally ill prisoners within the prison...

The use of psychiatric hospitalization for mental illness has evolved through Modernity. In the last century, indefinite and involuntary committal was a widespread practice but has now become an extraordinary and short-term therapeutic recourse. Even though law experts, doctors and other mental health professionals agree on the benefits of this shift, in practice there are disagreements rooted in the shortcomings of health service providers. The current medical and legal criteria for hospitalization of patients with mental disorders should move away from the concept of endangerment and embrace therapeutic procedures and social care...

BACKGROUND: The assessment of those presenting to prison in-reach and court diversion services and those referred for admission to mental health services is a triage decision, allocating the patient to the appropriate level of therapeutic security. This is a critical clinical decision. We set out to improve on unstructured clinical judgement. We collated qualitative information and devised an 11 item structured professional judgment instrument for this purpose then tested for validity...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

OBJECTIVE: The main objective of this paper is to compare the mental health Acts of the eight Australian jurisdictions and the 13 Canadian jurisdictions on three major issues: involuntary admission criteria, treatment authorization/consent and compulsory treatment in the community, in the light of international trends towards patients' rights. METHOD: The legislation was examined against the background of rights instruments such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities...

International historians have begun to challenge the view that the nineteenth-century psychiatric hospital was a place of horrors and custody, and have shown that families were sometimes intimate with the institutions of the past, often participating in the process of institutional committal. This article explores the state of historical inquiry into families and insanity in Australia and New Zealand. It asserts that by re-examining patient cases we might find fresh insights into the dynamic between families and mental health...

Any coercive medical intervention is a massive curtailment of the affected person's freedom that is in direct contradiction to their right to self-determination. This is why any such intervention must be laid on a solid legal and ethical foundation. Any decision to commit a person against their will for medical care will have to be made with due regard for both the institution's medical duty and society's interest in public safety. Any such decision must also involve careful consideration of whether the individual concerned is at acute risk of harming or injuring themselves or others as a result of their mental condition...

BACKGROUND: The history of institutional care for individuals with intellectual disability is under-researched, complex and troubling. AIMS: To explore the experiences of women who may have had intellectual disability and/or mental illness and were admitted to forensic psychiatric care in early twentieth-century Ireland. METHODS: All female case records at the Central Mental Hospital, Dublin from 1910 to 1948 (n = 42) were studied for evidence of possible intellectual disability and a series of five cases is presented in detail...