Psychiatry

This chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Emergency Medicine investigates psychiatry in the emergency department (ED). It provides a glossary of psychiatric terms and reviews the psychiatric interview and mental state examination. It explores dealing with the aggressive patient and safe consultations with potentially violent patients, managing aggression, and emergency tranquillization. It discusses self-harm, assessment of suicide risk, mental health assessment issues, depression, mania, schizophrenia, and complications of psychiatric drugs, as well as Munchausen’s syndrome and medically unexplained symptoms. It investigates how to deal with alcohol abuse, acute alcohol intoxication, alcohol withdrawal, alcohol-related brain injury, and help for alcoholics, as well as drug and substance abuse, compulsory hospitalization, and the Mental Capacity Act.