Predictors of violence in civilly committed acute psychiatric patients

The authors investigated the relationship between community violence and violence in the hospital for patients hospitalized through emergency civil commitment. The medical charts of 238 patients involuntarily admitted to a university-based acute inpatient unit were reviewed for evidence of violence during the 2 weeks before commitment and the first 72 hours of hospitalization. Patients who were violent in the community were more likely to be violent in the hospital. A discriminant function analysis was used to identify the combination of information concerning community violence and patient background characteristics that most efficiently predicted which patients were violent during emergency commitment.