[Psychological crises and crisis intervention]

In this country, the situation in the field of care for people suffering with acute psychic changes following psychotraumas and other changes which we generally describe as a crisis in one's life was unsatisfactory for a long time. The cause must be sought not only in automatization of medicine, inadequate professional training and lack of altruism on the part of doctors. After 1968 the very term "crisis" acquired an undesirable political connotation; although the right to a personal crisis was preserved, it was impossible to point out relations between the life situation of individual people on the one hand and makrosocial processes on the other. Crisis intervention was institutionalized only after the above obstructions had been removed; the first in-patients' crisis center in Czechoslovakia was opened on December 5, 1989 as a part of the psychiatric clinic in Brno-Bohunice.