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INTRODUCTION Hospitalization for mental illness is a serious, and at times traumatic, event for both patients and their families. Once the family or the patient’s physician has decided that the patient should be hospitalized, waiting for hospitalization may be disruptive of family and individual emotional health. A survey of studies1,5 of hospital waiting lists reveals most of them to be unsatisfactory in terms of asking such questions as these: How does the family react to waiting-list placement? How does the potential patient react? What kinds of behaviors led to waiting-list placement? What factors contribute to the family’s perception of the pre-waitinglist situation as being or not being a critical one? The present study is an attempt to explore these questions.*This paper has as its main objective to describe the prospective patients, and to try to clarify the psychiatric and familial nature of persons placed

INTRODUCTION There is always present a need in developing fields of scientific interests such as social psychiatry for new areas of observation. These areas offer fertile grounds for testing prevailing hypotheses and suggesting new ones. One such area is the interactions of the mental patient and his family, especially as those interactions become increasingly maladaptive and systematized. Such familial systems are quite similar to other social groups in their intrapersonal and interpersonal operations.1,9,15,26 Observation indicates that families in which there is a mental illness seem particularly prone to becoming progressively restricted in their interactions, as well as the goals and the range of problems and solutions available to members.The present paper presents a model of such operations and the sequence of behaviors and their interrelatedness to which the mental patient and his family seem so prone. Also presented are the consequences