Elaborate mechanisms and procedures have been created to deal with the admission of patients to mental hospitals but few concerned with their discharge. Offender patients or patients admitted on Sections 2, 3 or 4 find more often than not that the order ends, without ceremony, and they remain in hospitals as voluntary patients or are discharged. The former is more likely if they are on short-term orders; the average length of admission being about 3 months. Informal patients are similarly discharged as and when the registered medical practitioner deems it appropriate.

Types of discharge

To concentrate first on the formal patients: Section 23 grants powers to the MRO, the hospital managers and the nearest relatives to discharge or apply for discharge of formal patients. For patients on a short-term order, powers of early discharge are used infrequently by the responsible medical officer, slightly more so for those on a 6 months treatment order. But even so, it is interesting to observe that there are no legal criteria for determining discharge; again it is all a matter for clinical judgment. Nor is the medical practitioner obliged to discharge a patient if the criteria used at the admission stage are no longer fulfilled. There are secondary tacit assumptions that patients will be granted discharge as soon as they are ready, with, the further assumption that the hospital will return patients to the community as quickly as possible.