ABSTRACT
Little psychotherapy was given on the treatment services, although almost all chiefs were trained to give that kind of therapy. This chapter focuses on the patients' initiation of situational contact, considering first their chances of confronting the psychiatrists themselves. It assumes that patients participated in defining whether or not someone was approaching readiness for discharge. The chapter discusses how patients might negotiate for discharge from the various wards. It predicts that readers could scarcely help making judgments about the value of patients' hospitalization in the various treatment wards. The chapter suggests that some readers would dismiss all differences among these wards as irrelevant to basic improvement in patients, since no effective therapy is given, and that other readers would evaluate one ward most highly, for a variety of reasons. It describes not only how the teams perceived the hospital's resources, but how they disposed of them, to whom, and under what conditions.
