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From the psychiatric hospital to the community: integrating conditional release and contingency management
Author(s) -
Elbogen Eric B.,
Tomkins Alan J.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
behavioral sciences and the law
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.649
H-Index - 74
eISSN - 1099-0798
pISSN - 0735-3936
DOI - 10.1002/1099-0798(2000)18:4<427::aid-bsl387>3.0.co;2-x
Subject(s) - recidivism , contingency management , psychiatry , contingency , mental illness , intervention (counseling) , medicine , case management , psychology , mental health , linguistics , philosophy
Psychiatric hospital recidivism has been and continues to be a persistent problem in treating individuals with chronic mental illness. Conditional release, a form of involuntary outpatient commitment, has been suggested as one possible solution. Guided by therapeutic jurisprudence, this article presents a proposal about conditional release that would maximize convergence of social values and would be empirically testable. Specifically, a scientifically validated treatment intervention for individuals with chronic mental illness, contingency management, is integrated with conditional release. From this proposal, a number of empirical hypotheses and legal questions about discharging psychiatric patients are generated and discussed. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.