The same psychiatric patients, some need inpatient treatment, while others can be treated on an outpatient basis. What is the reason for this? It depends on whether the patient has “self-awareness”. Self-knowledge” is the patient’s ability to recognize his or her own psychiatric state. For example, most patients with schizophrenia, mania, depression, etc. lack or lose self-knowledge, so hospitalization is recommended. Of course, if the disease makes it difficult to protect one’s own safety and the safety of others or if there is an impulsive tendency, compulsory hospitalization is required in accordance with the legal requirements of the Mental Health Law of the People’s Republic of China. The so-called compulsory hospitalization is against the will of the patient, may be taken by the police or family members to take all possible measures to force hospitalization. If a patient recognizes that his or her mental state is abnormal, recognizes and criticizes the manifestations of his or her illness, and is able to seek medical treatment on his or her own initiative, he or she is said to have “self-knowledge” or complete self-knowledge, and is not at risk of committing an accident or disaster, then these patients can be treated on an outpatient basis under the supervision of their families. If the patient has the ability to recognize and judge some of the symptoms during the illness, but does not recognize another part of the symptoms as pathological, it is called “incomplete self-knowledge”. When a patient does not recognize his or her psychiatric symptoms as pathological, denial of mental abnormality is called “no self-knowledge” or “loss of self-knowledge”. Most of these two types of patients will not actively seek medical treatment, so hospitalization is the best policy, preferably by a guardian with their consent. However, the self-knowledge of psychiatric patients is not constant. If you find that a patient treated in an outpatient setting is losing his or her self-awareness, it is best to recommend that he or she be hospitalized. In the early stages of schizophrenia, for example, some patients have some self-knowledge, but as their illness worsens and they lose self-knowledge, they deny the illness and refuse treatment, so hospitalization is also recommended. During the recovery period, patients gradually regain self-awareness as their illness improves, and they will actively cooperate with treatment. When the psychiatric symptoms disappear, most patients gradually regain their self-knowledge and become more and more complete, therefore, self-knowledge is often used clinically as one of the signs to judge the disease. However, when self-knowledge is complete, psychiatric symptoms do not necessarily disappear completely. On the contrary, there are patients whose psychiatric symptoms have completely disappeared but who still lack self-knowledge or have partial self-knowledge for a long period of time, and such patients are still better treated in hospital. Generally speaking, most psychiatric patients lack self-awareness at the onset of the illness, do not admit that they are ill, refuse to seek medical treatment, and do not cooperate with the treatment; therefore, most of them think that their family members are intentionally harming them by persuading them to be hospitalized or examined in the hospital. Patients dominated by psychiatric symptoms cannot control their behavior and hit people indiscriminately, curse, break objects, run around without clothes and pants, or become depressed and depressed to commit suicide, etc. In serious cases, they will kill their relatives and others, and commit suicide due to the influence of symptoms. Therefore, China’s Criminal Law also stipulates that mentally ill persons are not criminally responsible for causing harmful results when they are unable to recognize and control their own behavior. For the safety of patients and their families, patients with a lack of self-knowledge can be forcibly sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment, which is beneficial to both the patient and the family and is the best option.