Many patients consulting medical emergency services make the initial contact because of psychiatric emergency situations. However, emergency physicians and their assistants are usually not sufficiently experienced in psychiatry. Therefore, psychiatric emergencies are sometimes only reluctantly accepted or inadequately treated by these services. Our present contribution aims at improving this situation. It gives a review of the main diagnostic groups concerned, their symptomatology and psychopathology, and offers some advice with regard to empathic verbal interventions and counselling in those emergency situations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.