COMMENT ON "MENTAL ILLNESS".

The article presents the author's response to the comments made by Walter R. Gove to his article on mental illness. According to the author, Gove refers to observations the author made on the defnitionaI process at two public California institutions in 1958-59. Most admissions during that period were involuntary, and his observations refer primarily to such patients. Moreover, according to the author his article dealt with the screening process, and his point was that what- ever serious screening took place occurred before hospital admission. The purpose of his article was to explain the contingencies under which the screening process varied. According to the author, some of the contingencies affecting the treatment process have changed in recent years, and hopefully they will continue to change further. To treat such processes as patient flow as static and independent of institutional influences is to miss a key sociological issue.