Phase Movement in the Support and Control of the Psychiatric Patient

The exploratory study reported here was designed to describe the by which a patient reaches a psychiatric hospital. Studies such as those of Clausen' and Mishler2 have focused on the process of defining the individual as ill and assigning him the patient role. This study takes up at the point of recognition of illness or deviance, and examines all of the patient's encounters on his way to hospital. These encounters are considered in terms of the role that the agent encountered ordinarily plays vis-a-vis the patient, and the position in the path at which various categories of role players characteristically appear. Regularities that appear among the paths, when they are looked at this way, might be construed as arising in the social process of the control of deviance rather than in individual characteristics of either the patients or the agents.