"No-commitment week": a feasibility study.

THIS REPORT addresses the controversy concerning involuntary commitment of patients to psychiatric hospitals, which continues to divide psychiatrists from each other and the mental health system from the judicial system. At one pole are those who argue that psychosis is an illness that permits a reliable diagnosis by appropriately trained physicians; that psychotic patients present a high risk of behavior that is dangerous to themselves or to others; that psychotic patients, precisely because of their psychoses, are frequently incapable of recognizing that they are ill and need treatment; and that the judgment that a person is psychotic and dangerous, and therefore in need of treatment, with or without consent, is one which a psychiatrist must be permitted to make without interference by any societal regulation or control beyond concurrence by a responsible member of the family of the patient.