New York under the Rivers decision: an epidemiologic study of drug treatment refusal.

Objective : to determine the characteristics of cases of drug treatment refusal under the Rivers decision, which mandated court adjudication of such cases, the authors made a retrospective study of all applications for court review during 1 year in New York State inpatient facilities. Method : sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of these 473 cases were compared with those of the 41,535 cases during the same period in which no court review was requested