Reasons for involuntary commitment in Manitoba and Ontario

This paper concerns itself with the question of involuntary commitment of psychiatric patients in southwestern Manitoba. The purpose was to survey the reasons given for involuntary psychiatric hospitalization by a group of Manitoba physicians in 1979, and to compare these reasons with those given by their Ontario counterparts, as described in the Page and Yates (1) and Page and Firth (2) studies. Particularly, the aim was to compare the relative emphasis given to dangerousness/self-harm reasons, in view of the fact that Manitoba's Mental Health Act makes no explicit reference to the dangerousness criterion, while Ontario's legislation has increasingly specified this factor as a necessary condition for civil commitment.