Operational Concepts in Psychiatric Hospital Management

The psychiatric hospital has traditionally been viewed as a refuge. In general, the concept held to is the one which emphasizes that the people who should be in the hospital are the ones who are suicidal or are a danger to other people or who cannot function even in the most simple non-tension provoking situations that are offered by the community. Recently, however, the mental hospital as described by Stanton and Schwartz may be seen to serve in another capacity, essentially by being a place in which long-term intensive psychotherapy can be administered under conditions of some control and with the advantages of numerous and insightful observations. In the paper presented here, the position is taken that there is yet another way in which an in-patient psychiatric facility may be gainfully used, namely by a situation being formulated, using the particular patient as a reference point, in which experimental findings in behavior and principles gleaned by research may be used to formulate a hospital environment which would produce material changes in the patient's activity. Such a formulation derives attractiveness by its operational nature. Reproducibility is unquestionable; evidence for efficacy may be obtained by sources exterior to the theory; and the background for the entire effort is firmly based on principles independently arrived at by experimental procedures. The three clinical examples which follow illustrate ways in which the hospital may be used to test these assertions

Attractiveness · Control (management) · Function (biology) · Psychiatric hospital · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Test (biology) · Therapeutic community · Computer Science · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Psychiatric care and mental health services · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications

• Cultural Adaptation on Overseas Assignments

  E K Briody, Elizabeth Briody et al.•Human Organization•1991

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• Operational Psychiatry

  George Winokur•Human Organization•1957

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• Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought

  Marcus O'Brien, Ruth L Munroe•The American Catholic Sociological…•1957

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