[The psychiatric hospital between obligatory admission and legal responsibilities (author's transl)]

This article focuses on the risks to which a physician is exposed under the provisions of the penal code if he is called upon to decide whether a patient should be admitted to the hospital or not. The conflict between the physician's obligation to protect the patient to be admitted, on the one hand, and to treat all inmates in accordance with the state of the art ("lege artis") and with humanitarian principles, on the other, necessarily leads to problems which are difficult to manage from the legal point of view. It is less likely that such problems can be solved by issuing strict regulations standardizing the procedure, than by improving the overall availability of medical care and treatment facilities.