An Overview of Crisis Intervention in the Emergency Rooms of General Hospitals

General hospitals throughout the land have—and in all likelihood will continue to have—emergency rooms that are more or less adequate. It seems strategically sound to do all we can to strengthen these sites of centralized help for the wide variety of medicosocial predicaments that can be expected to recur in all communities. In this paper the authors summarize some historical and theoretical considerations they believe can contribute to a productive refinement of existing emergency services at a time when direct federal support for health services is being drastically curtailed.