[Psychiatric emergencies : specific phenomenon.]

In as much as it is situated at a crossroads, emergency psychiatric practice provides a remarkable observation point in relation to a number of new facts: the recession, unemployment, the lack of health, the growth and development of the autonomy of the para-psychiatric professions, deinstitutionalization, the poorly-defined extension of the field of psychiatry. The réponse, even the site of this response, to demands for urgent service, its ties to medicine and to society, represent major questions. The essential reasons for providing emergency psychiatric care remain the curtailment of pathology, the early assumption of care, the reduction of errors in diagnosis and the teaching of psychiatry in the medical milieu. Although seemingly evident, these affirmations deserve to be evaluated, to be the subject of epidemiological and démographie research. Beginning with the new problems posed by the economic recession, and in the face of the situation of medicine and psychiatry, the author describes two critical situations concerning the current organization of emergency care: the saturation of transitory units and the connections between the specialties.