Psychiatric emergencies in a Nigerian general hospital

Subjects attending the emergency services of the Ibadan teaching hospital for psychological problems in a 14-month period were studied, with a view to highlighting the pattern of psychiatric emergencies in a large general hospital. Three hundred and twenty-six subjects made 335 emergency visits. The 181 new cases seen at the Casualty constituted 2% of the newly registered patients attending that unit of the hospital. About 7% of the subjects attended for deliberate self-harm, while 45.7% and 20.9% of the visits were for functional psychotic and non-psychotic illnesses respectively. Cases with acute undifferentiated psychosis of suspected organic aetiology constituted 13.7% of the visits. About 5% of the visits were for substance abuse problems, 6.3% for extrapyramidal reaction to anti-psychotic drugs, while 5.7% were cases of other forms of organic psychotic conditions. In only 19.5% of the visits requiring admission could the subjects be admitted because of scarcity of in-patient beds.