Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Tables and Figures
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Indianisation and its Discontents
- Chapter 2 The Patients: The Demographics of Gender and Age, Locality, Occupation, Caste and Religion
- Chapter 3 Institutional Trends and Standardisation: Deaths, Diseases and Cures
- Chapter 4 Classifications, Types of Disorder and Aetiology
- Chapter 5 Treatments
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - Institutional Trends and Standardisation: Deaths, Diseases and Cures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Tables and Figures
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Indianisation and its Discontents
- Chapter 2 The Patients: The Demographics of Gender and Age, Locality, Occupation, Caste and Religion
- Chapter 3 Institutional Trends and Standardisation: Deaths, Diseases and Cures
- Chapter 4 Classifications, Types of Disorder and Aetiology
- Chapter 5 Treatments
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The scientific purist, who will wait for medical statistics until they are nosologically exact, is no wiser than Horace's rustic waiting for the river to flow away [before he crosses].
—Major Greenwood, 1948The rate and pattern of patients' mortality in mental institutions are important parameters in the assessment of clinical outcomes. They provide a way of measuring the effects of mental healthcare provision. The study of death rates has been an important focus of analysis since the first half of the nineteenth century. Mortality is, of course, closely related not only to the care and attention an institution bestows on its inmates, but also its patient intake and their health status on admission. Recent research in Western countries has shown that mortality among psychiatric patients in both institutional and community-based care settings remains high. In Sweden the mortality rate for 12, 103 patients in the late 1990s was three times that of the wider population; a Norwegian study of psychiatric inpatients from 1980 to 1992 concluded that ‘mortality of psychiatric patients is still unsatisfactorily high’; and an assessment of data from seven German hospitals in the mid-1990s revealed that over six times more patients died than expected. Furthermore, an Italian team of epidemiologists concluded in 1997 that:
longer periods of hospitalization and non-discharge from hospital are the main risk factors for death in psychiatric patients, who globally experience higher death rates than the general population for a wide spectrum of causes of death, whatever their diagnosis or gender.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Colonialism and Transnational PsychiatryThe Development of an Indian Mental Hospital in British India, c. 1925-1940, pp. 67 - 104Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013