Short versus long hospitalization: a prospective controlled study. V. One-year follow-up results for...

The authors studied the effect of long-term versus short-term hospitalization on a group of 74 patients with the diagnoses of affective disorder, neurosis and personality disorder, and hysterical personality one year after their admission to the hospital. Although they had found in an earlier study that short-term patients seemed to integrate more rapidly in the hospital, the results reported in this study showed no statistically reliable differences between the long-term and short-term groups. In contrast to the author's results for schizophrenic patients, their findings for nonschizophrenic patients do not support extended hospitalization.