Mental Health: Intervention Skills for the Emergency Services

This book addresses the practical management of mental health scenarios in the emergency setting and offers first-hand reflections on how emergency nurses, practitioners and allied mental health professionals handle these situations. Responding to mental health needs in emergency situations can be profoundly complex. Frequently emergency nurses and other personnel express their feelings of powerlessness, as they do not know what to say or do in order to achieve the best outcome, and have concerns that their intervention may make the situation worse for those in their care. How a practitioner confronts the mental health encounter and takes the essential steps in managing the event can have a critical impact on how that person copes in the future. This book helps readers understand what is involved in mental health work in emergency situations, and the practical, psychosocial and spiritual tensions that arise from managing the event and the sequelae. Moreover, it shows that it may be possible to provide a more effective emergency mental health service.

This unique edited book presents critical reflections on aspects of mental health work gathered from the ‘hands-on’ experiences of the personnel. Mental health encounters in the emergency context are described in detail, illustrating not only what emergency nurses and mental health workers ‘do’ when mental health crises occur, but also what they feel about what they ‘do’. 

Written by a diverse team of emergency and mental health nurses and allied professionals currently engaged in emergency care both in hospital and pre-hospital settings, this book will appeal to emergency nurses and allied health professionals alike.