Emergency in psychiatry
Campailla, G.
Minerva Medica 68(16): 1017-1025
1977
ISSN/ISBN: 0026-4806 PMID: 854219 Document Number: 118237
Any form of intervention carried out with various means that cannot be put off may be described as urgent. The differences between urgency in psychiatry and in general medicine are recalled. A distinction is drawn between real psychiatric, real pseudopsychiatric, and psychiatric pseudourgency due to pathomimesis. The first category includes cases of anxiety crisis, suicidal tendency, widespread pathological depression, and mental confusion, the second those in which the main psychotic symptom masks a somatic disease, and the third cases brought into being by the patient because his ambient, family or precarious economic position offer no other solution to his problem than the mimicking of a disease and its dramatisation to the point of an emergency. General hospital should deal with psychiatric urgency in cooperation with psychiatric divisions or clinic, since resort may have to be made to resuscitation centres, toxicological laboratories, intensive cares departments, cardiology departments, etc. Emergency patients can be handled at the out-patient level, or by means of a short period of hospitalisation.