Gender Differences in Long-Stay Psychiatric Inpatients

There are many well-documented gender differencees in schizophrenia: in age at onset [ 1-8], clinical symptoms [9, 1 0], social competence, medication, prognosis [11,12], severity of the illness, and utilization of hospital services [ 1 3]. In most of the relevant studies, only first-admission schizophrenic patients have constituted the study population. There is no uniform consensus about the definition of a longstay patient. Usually such patients have been defined as those who have been hospitalized continuously for at least six months or more [14-16]. In studies concerning long-stay patients, the subjects have been predominantly schizophrenics, their clinical symptoms are severe, and it is problematic to place them anywhere other than in a hospital [17-19]. Psychiatric inpatients have in recent years been found to be more severely disturbed than was previously the case, possibly because of the deinstitutionalization process [1 8-20].