CAPACITY TO CONSENT TO VOLUNTARY HOSPITALIZATION - SEARCHING FOR A SATISFACTORY ZINERMON SCREEN

Half a decade ago, the Zinermon court announced the need for clinician s to evaluate the competence of people with mental illness to consent to voluntary hospital admission, but the court did not specify the tes t of capacity that mental health professionals should use. As has occu rred in other areas dealing with legal competence, there is a need for the field to develop standardized assessment procedures for evaluatin g capacity to consent to voluntary hospitalization. Both theorethical and practical considerations suggest that these procedures should be m odeled after what S. K. Hoge has termed a ''weak'' model of consent. T his and other studies of the ability of mentally ill persons to unders tand disclosed information suggest that their level of understanding m ay be assessed optimally with measures that utilize recognition rather than recall response elicitation formats.