The mobile psychiatric emergency team

Until the formation of PET the San Pedro Mental Health Service was a fairly traditional clinic. Even though there was a worker on duty to handle any walk-in crisis and a 24 hour telephone service for emergency calls from the clinic's clients, the clinic operated on a long-term, analytic, medically oriented philosophy. Now the clinic is a community mental health facility and a crisis center. The total philosophy of the clinic has changed. Long-term individual and group psychotherapy have been reduced; short-term modalities are being emphasized, especially those approaches that focus on the present problems; the use of medications has been reduced as well as the use of mental illness as a label; the community is viewed as the therapist; consultations have become a component critical to the emergency services programs as well as to the other programs in the clinic; and preventive programs are much more strongly emphasized. More than anything else, success of the mobite psychiatric emergency team seems to be related to the new attitudes of the staff toward the clients and an aggressive stance toward therapy and consultation (AU)