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Virginia Aldigé Hiday

Publications and source records attributed to Virginia Aldigé Hiday.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

PLC or TLC: is outpatient commitment the/an answer?

The lively debate over mandated community treatment in general and outpatient commitment laws (OPC) in particular has raised many issues. At its core, the debate is over how and to what extent laws should be formulated to persuade, leverage or coerce (PLC) persons with severe mental illness living in the community to comply with medications that mental health professionals believe they need. The alternative to PLC is what we call TLC (tender loving care): a strategy of using benefits - improved patient-centered treatment, entitlements and service delivery, including assertive outreach - rather than penalties or conditions on access to services, to induce compliance. We examine three aspects of the debate: (1) the empirical case for the need for OPC court orders to maintain revolving-door severely mentally ill persons in the community; (2) the normative argument over whether such orders constitute coercion, and, if so, whether that coercion is justifiable; and (3) the incentives such orders create to leverage community providers to augment resources and tailor treatment and services to entice patients to become willing participants in the management of their disorders.

Ambulatory Care↗
PubMed2006

Mental health court outcomes: a comparison of re-arrest and re-arrest severity between mental health court and traditional court participants.

Mental health courts have been proliferating across the country since their establishment in the late 1990's. Although numerous advocates have proclaimed their merit, only few empirical studies have evaluated their outcomes. This paper evaluates the effect of one mental health court on criminal justice outcomes by examining arrests and offense severity from one year before to one year after entry into the court, and by comparing mental health court participants to comparable traditional criminal court defendants on these measures. Multivariate models support the prediction that mental health courts reduce the number of new arrests and the severity of such re-arrests among mentally ill offenders. Similar analysis of mental health court completers and non-completers supports the prediction that a "full dose" of mental health treatment and court monitoring produce even fewer re-arrests.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Impact of outpatient commitment on victimization of people with severe mental illness.

OBJECTIVE: The authors' goal was to evaluate the effectiveness of outpatient commitment in reducing victimization among people with severe mental illness. METHOD: One hundred eighty-four involuntarily hospitalized patients were randomly assigned to be released (N=99) or to continue under outpatient commitment (N=85) after hospital discharge. An additional group of patients with a recent history of serious violent behavior (N=39) was nonrandomly assigned to at least a brief period of outpatient commitment following hospital disharge. All three groups were followed for 1 year, and case management services plus additional outpatient treatment were provided to all subjects. Outcome data were based on interviews with the patients and informants as well as service records. RESULTS: Subjects who were ordered to outpatient commitment were less likely to be criminally victimized than those who were released without outpatient commitment. Multivariate analysis indicated that each additional day of outpatient commitment reduced the risk of criminal victimization and that outpatient commitment had its effect through improved medication adherence, reduced substance use or abuse, and fewer violent incidents. CONCLUSIONS: Protection from criminal victimization appears to be a positive, unintended consequence of outpatient commitment.

Adolescent↗