Hospital treatment of multiple personality disorder. An overview.
MPD patients are not rare. They frequently need hospital treatment. This brief and necessarily incomplete communication has attempted to share what is generally known and accepted with regard to their inpatient care. Such knowledge, however, even though it represents the current state of the art, is, like all state-of-the art knowledge, preliminary with regard to what remains to be discovered and developed. It is anticipated that within the next decade the increasing recognition of such patients will result in their becoming commonplace within most psychiatric hospital settings, drawing the attention of more and more hospitals and psychiatrists alike to the study of their care. At that point, the concentrated attention and endeavors of large numbers of skilled mental health professionals and administrators will, in all likelihood, bring fresh insights and offer new approaches that will enrich and perhaps supplant the observations and advices offered in this contribution.