The Lengths of Psychiatric Hospital Stays and Community Stays

Abstract

We use advanced survival analysis methods to estimate the parameters affecting the joint distribution of exit dates from psychiatric hospitals and return dates to those hospitals. Data comes from Virginia state psychiatric hospital administrative records. We find that sex, marital status, employment status, diagnosis, and age help explain durations. We also find that there is significant duration dependence and unobserved heterogeneity which suggest that earlier analyses in this field that used simpler estimation methods were flawed.