Psychiatric and nonmedical decisions on commitment.

The civil commitment statutes of Oregon were changed in 1973 and 1975 to include nonphysician court examiners and public prosecutors in the commitment hearing. To evaluate the effect of these changes the authors compared the commitment decisions actually made by panels composed of two physicians with those made by panels with one physician and one nonphysician mental health professional. They also compared the commitment decisions made by six groups of medical and nonmedical people involved with the commitment process regarding five case vignettes. They found that decisions made by the nonmedical mental health professionals were not significantly different from those made by the psychiatric examiners.