To the Editor.—Ìý I recently published a report¹ that described the screening of patients for admission to a state hospital, and the outcomes of patients who refused that admission. Consequently, I was interested to see an article by Apsler and Bassuk² that attempted to delineate the criteria for psychiatric hospitalization and then attempted to look at the individual differences between the admitting physicians' decisions. I found a number of similarities between our studies. First, in the study by Apsler and Bassuk, patients were hospitalized in a psychiatric unit of a general hospital; patients hospitalized in our study at a state hospital had lower Global Assessment Scale (GAS) ratings than those patients who were not admitted to each study. Second, more patients with psychotic diagnoses were hospitalized in each study. Third, the patients with more chronic disease in our state hospital study were hospitalized. This parallels the findings by