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British Psychiatric Ward Treatment Environments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Rudolph H. Moos*
Affiliation:
Stanford University, Department of Psychiatry, Stanford, California, U.S.A., 94305

Extract

During the past two decades the psychosocial environments of psychiatric wards have become of increasing concern. Different investigators have described the importance of the therapeutic milieu of such wards and have implied that treatment environment strongly influences treatment outcome. At first there were detailed observations and naturalistic descriptions indicating the importance of ward social structure in facilitating or hindering treatment goals (Stanton and Schwartz, 1954; Caudill, 1958). Then came a variety of different types of ward programmes designed to use the ward environment as an important treatment modality (Jones, 1953; Cumming and Cumming, 1962; Fairweather, 1962). These different approaches present quite different specific recommendations about the most effective types of treatment environments; however, they do all agree on one essential point: that the immediate psychosocial environment in which patients function is an important determinant of the outcome of the treatment process.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1972 

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