Psychiatric Emergencies

Welcome to the Emergency Psychiatry Special Report.

The law says anyone under the age of 18 is considered “incompetent” in regard to health care decisions. But is this what’s best for treatment?

The new suicide hotline is launching July 16. Are we ready for it?

Substance use disorder may prove to be a significant issue for some mothers.

During the first day on the job, a psychiatry resident sees patients who need help, but there are problems with the system designed to help them.

The emergency department is a primary care location for patients with schizophrenia. Here’s how to manage schizophrenia in this particular setting in an informed and caring manner.

Yes, we need better crisis management, but what we really need is better crisis prevention.

What is excited delirium syndrome and how should it be treated? The short answer is we do not know.

What treatments could handle both psychiatric emergencies and long-standings mental health conditions—in a hurry?

Collaborative care guides care across disciplines, including psychology, psychiatry, and primary care. The goal is to change practice, build community, and identify health professionals needing the most assistance.

More than half of physicians believe that seeking psychiatric care would jeopardize their employment. What can be done?

As physicians first, psychiatrists must consider the big picture, without reflexive and thoughtless prescriptions for psychotropics—even if many, including medical professionals, assume that is all we do.

Psychiatric emergencies occur when a patient is a danger to self, to others, or is so psychiatrically impaired the patient cannot meet their own basic needs. How do such emergencies manifest?

Imagine working with a young patient showing signs of psychosis for the past 6 weeks. Your initial assessment appears to rule out medical- or substance-induced etiologies, yet symptoms persist. What's a psychiatrist to do?

When concern for a patient is not so severe that a clinician feels compelled to call the police, there are options.

As a discipline, emergency psychiatry has widened its role, especially following the enormous mental health fallout from the pandemic and the shift of police and first-responder interventions.

Be on the lookout for these novel psychoactive substances.

The most common emergency presentations to emergency departments are identified.

Racism is a problem that exists in our space. A new advocacy moment is here, and it needs to be seized.

Inevitably, some of your patients will need of emergency psychiatric services. These tips will help prepare you and your patients when a crisis unfolds.

Emergency Psychiatry: Principles and Practice has something for everyone and is easily applicable to emergency and primary care.

Society’s psychological reactions to a crisis can be predicted according to disaster response frameworks, which can be used to understand what to build during the evolving COVID-19 crisis, and when those innovations will prove most vital.

As hospital-based psychiatric emergency programs around the country demonstrate the ability to minimize ED boarding, provide cost-savings, and improve patient outcomes and clinician satisfaction, the challenge will be how to keep these models of psychiatric care self-supporting.

This article, the first of a three-part series, describes how hospital-based psychiatric EDs differ from community-based crisis centers.

This article discusses the peculiarities of emergency psychiatric practice and reviews innovations in models of care delivery designed to overcome the challenges of this subspecialty.

If an appropriate treatment is started promptly, the majority of psychiatric emergencies can be resolved within 24 hours without inpatient hospitalization.

What are the symptoms and treatment strategies for this rapidly growing phenomenon in older adults?

In the emergency department, how should patients with behavioral disturbances and especially those with illnesses such as dementia, TBI, autism spectrum disorder, and intellectual disability be managed? Take the quiz and learn more.

The authors compare the clinical features of idiopathic psychosis (eg, schizophrenia) with cannabis-induced psychosis.