Background: Despite multiple ethical issues and little evidence of their efficacy, compulsory admission and treatment are still common psychiatric practice. Therefore, we aimed to assess potential differences in treatment and outcome between voluntarily and compulsorily admitted patients.
Methods: We extracted clinical data from inpatients treated in an academic hospital in Zurich, Switzerland between January 1, 2013 and December 31, 2019. Observation time started upon the first admission and ended after a one-year follow-up after the last discharge. Several sociodemographic and clinical characteristics, including Health of the Nation Outcome Scales (HoNOS) scores, were retrospectively obtained. We then identified risk factors of compulsory admission using logistic regression in order to perform a widely balanced propensity score matching. Altogether, we compared 4,570 compulsorily and 4,570 voluntarily admitted propensity score-matched patients. Multiple differences between these groups concerning received treatment, coercive measures, clinical parameters, and service use outcomes were detected.
Results: Upon discharge, compulsorily admitted patients reached a similar HoNOS sum score in a significantly shorter duration of treatment. They were more often admitted for crisis interventions, were prescribed less pharmacologic treatment, and received fewer therapies. During the follow-up, voluntarily admitted patients were readmitted more often, while the time to readmission did not differ.
Conclusions: Under narrowly set circumstances, compulsory admissions might be helpful to avert and relieve exacerbations of severe psychiatric disorders.
Keywords: Coercion; HoNOS; compulsory admission; involuntary hospitalization; readmission.