Psychiatric Complaints in the ED — What to Keep in Mind

Author: Victoria Weston, MD
AAEM/RSA President

Originally Published: Common Sense, September/October 2015

A familiar scene in many emergency departments: you are on a busy overnight shift. You have just finished caring for a trauma patient and your part of the ED is filled with high-acuity patients. You see that a new “crisis” patient has been placed in a room, so you go assess him. You find a disheveled young male with flat affect, who appears to be responding to internal stimuli. He is able to tell you that he had a recent inpatient psychiatric hospitalization. He is not taking his medications. He agrees to be seen by the crisis team. You leave and return to your desk to run the list and get caught up on charting.

Management of Suicide Attempts in the Emergency Department

Photo Credit: Pixabay

Author: Felix Matos Padilla, MSV
Medical Student
Universidad Iberoamericana (UNIBE) School of Medicine

This post was peer reviewed.
Click to learn more.

Suicide is by far the most common cause of premature death among patients with major mood and psychotic disorders.[1] Attempted suicide is defined as a nonfatal self-inflicted destructive act with the explicit or implicit intent to die.[2] In 2008, a total of 36,035 persons died as a result of suicide, and approximately 666,000 persons visited hospital emergency departments (EDs) for nonfatal self-inflicted injuries [3] With this in mind, it is fundamental for an emergency physician to know how to handle a suicide attempt.