States are rolling out more and more aggressive forced treatment policies, ever widening the range of people who can be targeted for involuntary hospitalization. Yet a new study shows that this system is actually increasing the very problems it is meant to alleviate: Forced hospitalization substantially increases the risk of death by suicide, death by overdose, and violent crime—nearly doubling these effects.
“This result is surprising,” the researchers write in an accompanying FAQ. “Involuntary hospitalizations are a public safety measure, and the finding that they are driving more of the outcomes they seek to prevent in the judgement call subpopulation we study has important policy implications. The significance is especially pronounced since many locations across the country are seeking to scale up involuntary hospitalizations.”
Although the layperson may think that involuntary hospitalization is rare, the researchers note that it is “a widespread practice,” with 1.2 million people forcibly hospitalized each year. That makes it more than twice as common as death from cancer, they write. And this practice is growing more common every year, with many states implementing policies to expand forced treatment.
It has been difficult for researchers to study whether involuntary hospitalization is actually helpful or not. Research consistently shows that those who get hospitalized are at greater risk of suicide and other negative outcomes after hospitalization. However, this is confounded by the fact that, supposedly, those who get hospitalized are those who are already at a much higher risk of these outcomes.
The current study aimed to get around this limitation. They used quasi-random assignment (a way of mapping real-world outcomes that simulates a randomized trial) and focused solely on the cases that were considered “judgment calls”—cases in which one clinician might hospitalize, while another might not—to remove that confounding factor. Thus, the current study is probably as close as we will ever get to having a true randomized, controlled trial to answer this question.
Of course, this also means that their study results only apply to those “judgment call” cases—but the researchers estimate that they add up to 43% of all involuntarily hospitalized patients.
Ultimately, although they can’t say that all involuntary hospitalization is detrimental, they are able to say that it is detrimental on average for nearly half of those who experience it—and thus, in “judgment call” cases, clinicians should err on the side of not forcibly imprisoning their patients.
And the policy implication is that involuntary hospitalization should be drastically reduced, not rolled out as a policy to capture more and more people.
“Does involuntary hospitalization achieve its goals?” the researchers ask. “Our results suggest that, on the margin, the system we study is not achieving the intended effects of the policy.”
The study was conducted by Natalia Emanuel at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Pim Welle at the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, and Valentin Bolotnyy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. It was published sans peer review in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports.
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Read that yesterday via Rob Wiponds blog.
The conclusion isn’t very surprising to those who have experienced coercive hospitalization, I guess. At least it wasn’t for me.
The methodology is incredibly smart, tho. I wasn’t aware of this method. Turns out the 2021 Nobel in econ was awarded for this.
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It’s interesting that this study was published by globalist bankers, and an organization that is “known for promoting personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government” – as opposed to in a medical journal – I will say, as a small American banker’s daughter, who has been speaking out against psychiatric fraud, criminality, and greed, for well over a decade.
Of course, “Forced Hospitalization Increases Suicide and Violent Crime” … welcome to the common sense.
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Psychiatry was never about treating people. It’s about bullying people and making them sicker so they can maintain the brainwashing of human society. You don’t even need a study to know that the methods of psychiatry are bogus and only cause harm. All you need to know is that we were told we had constitutional rights, but they developed “psychiatry” as an excuse to violate those constitutional rights! What gives them the right to grant police powers to psychiatrists to violate people’s rights? There is no excuse! We must understand that as long as they can invent excuses to violate people’s rights that we are really living in a dictatorship! In Nazi Germany, the doctors were instrumental in maintaining the regime. The same is true in America. The doctors lie to us about so many things. But the psychiatrists in particular lie about almost everything, which is why they have been deputized by the “SS” or authorities to violate and take away people’s rights!
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It’s a pity that people are turning to the mental health industry, with its long and disturbing history of abuse of patients, when Christianity had the cure for mental illness all along. I myself experienced freedom from 2 decades of depression by doing deliverance in Jesus’ name. I was also received freedom from binge issues and an odd compulsive behavior. You can find more testimonies of healing through Christ here: https://totalmentalhealth.info/cured-of-mental-illness-part-1/
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Thank you for sharing and for the insights however, the conclusions drawn by the researcher as well as the summary by MIA cannot be made because of a confounding variable in the design.
The researchers recognized and took out all people who clearly met a certain criteria to be hospitalized, so we don’t need to address them. The roughly 43% though that was left to clinical discretion is what we’re focused upon. What you have are patients who come present a certain risk level and clinicians that viewed them as a higher risk level and chose to hospitalize them, later showed to have more suicide attempts and other problems post hospitalization. These our correlational relationships, but both the researchers and Mia reviewer are making causal conclusions. You can’t say that the hospitalization increased the level of suicide and other problems, cuz it could be very well that it was V accuracy of the clinician to recognize they had more severe pathology, and that severe pathology was the cause.
In order to make the conclusions that they’re making, you would need another third control group where you have clinician Discretions, but all of them are not hospitalized. You then would compare the group that was under consideration for hospitalization that all were released, and compare that rate of suicide and other problems to the group that was hospitalized. If, if, you find that the group that was hospitalized now have a higher rate of suicide and other problems, compared to the control group who otherwise would have been left to discretion but we’re all released, then you could say that was true. However, if the group that was evaluated and left to clinician determination, but all were released, and their suicide rate matches that of the group that were hospitalized, then you can’t say it’s due to the hospitalization.
The fact that people are hospitalized, potential loss of job, potential loss of autonomy, potential new mistrust within the relationships of clinicians and or possibly the people who call the police and or did the petition to have them hospitalized, all those factors absolutely and clearly could increase a loss of hope, suicide ideation and or behavior, and a host of other problems. On Prima fascia, it totally makes sense, however the data obtained really can’t be used without that control group to compare it to. Otherwise you’re simply saying when clinicians felt that somebody was more pathological, post officeization they ended up being more pathology even after the hospital.
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Though I do think we can conclude that hospitalization did not appear to make the person less likely to be suicidal. “Treatment” was at best ineffective.
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I would believe this, but based on data design… it is possible that IF they had a control group AND that group with no hospitalization had higher suicide rates than hospital group, then we could say hospital lowered rates…but since there was no control…really can’t say anything causal.
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It doesn’t take a scientist to know that using physical force (violence) and possibly even deadly weapons to kidnap people and hold them against their will for committing no crime, increases the rate of suicide and violent crime! These constitutional violations must end and the police must go back to apprehending actual criminals!
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