253
Discussion
The results of this study show that psychiatric patients expect help with social and economic problems in addition to alleviation of their more obvious symptomatology. Present data are consistent with those reported by Fitzgibbons, Cutler and Cohen(3), who found that "marriage)' and ('economic-vocational" problems comprised two out of seven factors on a self-perceived treatment-needs scale for psychiatric patients.
The major finding of this investigation was that with few exceptions, treatment expectations among patients bore little relationship to psychiatric diagnosis. The few differences obtained were primarily due to the fact that 8s classified as Transient Personality Disorders expected less help in areas of personal behavior change and physical symptoms than Ss with diagnoses typically regarded as more chronic. In general, lack of association between treatment expectation and diagnosis complement findings by Eisler and Polak ( l ) that predisposing stress factors essentially are unrelated to diagnostic classification. SUMMARY A scale was developed to survey the treatment expectations of psychiatric patients subsequently diagnosed Neurotic, Psychotic, Character Disorder, Alcoholic, and Transient Personality Disorder. Responses of 103 male inpatients were categorized on six treatment expectation scales : No Treatment, Personal Behavior Change, Interpersonal Change, Job and School, Psychiatric Symptom, and Physical Symptom. The major finding was that treatment expectations of patients generally were unrelated to psychiatric diagnosis.