[Voluntary and involuntary admissions to a psychiatric hospital]

The author's objective is that of detailing the oversimplified concept of voluntary and non-voluntary admission to a psychiatric hospital. He proposes to measure consent using a scale comprising five categories to which were assigned 200 first admissions to the Clinic of Nant in 1982. The author compares each category to the total number of cases and selects as discriminating factor, eleven items destined to highlight a possible differentiation in consent. This approach permits to observe a distribution of patients likely to bring out different shades and a different understanding of the concept of consent. The author has utilized for his evaluation, criteria which are not all connected with pathology. Demographic data; circumstances under which admission was made; attitude of the patient's milieu, as well as the type of request formulated by the patient himself, were taken into consideration. Results were interpreted as a confirmation of the author's hypothesis according to which several of the items taken into consideration, in particular the capacity to discriminate, have an incidence on the "quality" of consent at the time of admission.