Individuals Experience With the Discharge Process From Acute Mental Health Hospital Units

The transition from acute mental health units into community supports has always been a complicated process for many service users. Often within acute mental health units, the main focus for an individual’s treatment is surrounding medication adjustment and crisis stabilization, in conjunction with therapeutic approaches. Once an individual is deemed as “stable” by the attending physician, a discharge date is set. As the idea of stability looks different for many individuals, this can result in inadequate discharge planning. The goal of this research is to use a narrative methodological approach to understand how participants felt when they were informed of their discharge from an acute mental health unit. The purpose of this research is to explore if there were community supports put in place prior to their discharge, and if those supports had any correlation to what the participants deemed as a “successful” outcome.