State Laws on Emergency Holds for Mental Health Stabilization.

Objective: Psychiatric emergency hold laws permit involuntary admission to a health care facility of a person with an acute mental illness under certain circumstances. This study documented critical variation in state laws, identified important questions for evaluation research, and created a data set of laws to facilitate the public health law research of emergency hold laws' impact on mental health outcomes.

Methods: The research team built a 50-state, open-source data set of laws currently governing emergency holds.