Characteristics associated with legal status change among psychiatric patients.

Typically research on civil commitment has simply compared voluntary and involuntary psychiatric patients and has ignored the process of legal status change. The present study examined patient characteristics associated with legal status change during different points of patients' hospital stays. Results indicated that patients with greater improvement, patients with more severe diagnoses, and non-minority patients were more likely to transition to voluntary status, but only when these transitions occurred early in the hospitalization. Later in the hospitalization, the presence of living arrangements involving family and friends was associated with higher rates of transition to voluntary status.