Background: Given the current tendency to shorten psychiatric hospitalization and change its organization, an issue could be raised regarding its outcomes.
Purpose: To analyze features related to length of stay in a short-term inpatient treatment, to study outcomes and to evaluate the diagnosis-specific effects of hospitalization.
Method: A sample of 310 consecutive hospitalized patients, with psychotic disorder, depressive disorder and bipolar disorder (DSM IV-TR), was recruited at the University Psychiatric Clinic, Service for Cognitive Disorders, Department of Neuroscience, University of Turin. Severity of illness was rated using the brief psychiatry rating scale (BPRS). We evaluated relations between length of stay and clinical and socio-demographic features (linear regression) and possible differences confronting BPRS scores at admission and discharge in the different diagnostic subgroups (ANOVA for repeated measures).
Results: All the sample of patients showed a significant improvement in symptomatology during hospitalization. Worse symptomatology in anxiety-depression domain of BPRS at admission in the whole sample was positively correlated with length of stay. A longer length of stay was also shown in patients with diagnosis of depressive disorder. Finally, a different pattern of improvement of BPRS (total score and domains) was shown between the different diagnostic groups.
Conclusion: Brief hospitalization in our service was shown to be highly effective. Different diagnostic groups had different response to hospitalization, showing faster improvement in characteristic symptomatology, but the anxiety-depression domain showed the highest percentage of change for all the diagnostic groups. We therefore suppose that hospitalization has two effects: a specific (due to tailored therapies) and a non-specific one (due to non-specific therapy and to a placebo-like effect).