Individual Resources, Societal Reaction, and Hospital Commitment

Despite the attention a number of sociologists have given to the societal reaction perspective on deviant behavior and especially mental illness, few efforts have been made to investigate or even systematically to conceptualize conceptualize contingences of the social reaction. In this paper I hypothesize that important contingencies in hospital commitment are individual resources and community integration-visibility. Using the ratio of involuntary to voluntary hospital admissions to state hospitals in Washington as a measure of societal reaction, I found that the data consistently support the hypotheses.