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A psychiatric emergency is an alteration in behavior, mood, or thought, which the patient, a friend, a relative, or a professional feels requires immediate medical/ psychiatric attention [1]. In the case of substance abuse, this emergency is caused by a drug or other toxic substance which the patient usually takes voluntarily [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,]. Implicit in the usual definition of a psychiatric emergency is that it occurs in the context of an outpatient crisis service or a medical emergency department. This is an artificially limited view of the setting of a psychiatric emergency and will be broadened in this paper to include psychiatric emergencies which occur in inpatient and outpatient medical and psychiatric settings as well as a psychiatric crisis-walk-in clinic or medical emergency department.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-8108-2_12

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