[Crisis interventions: a psychotherapeutical challenge for psychiatric emergencies?]

Taking care of patients consulting the emergency psychiatric unit, raises nosological, legal, ethical and even logistic questions for the emergency departments. The need for emergency psychiatric interventions has grown constantly during the last twenty years and clinicians were challenged to find a new psychotherapeutic approach, more focused on the actual symptoms presented by the patients than the 'classic' psychiatric interventions. The goal of this article is to discuss the possibility of a psychotherapeutic approach in an emergency department, departing from a treatment model that has been developed at the psychiatric emergency of the University of Milan. In this approach, the psychotherapeutic treatment is divided in four different stages: preparation, incubation, transformation and verification. The "psychiatric crisis" becomes an opportunity to change for the patient, being a passage rite towards a new and better psychological functioning.