Do Crisis Services Work?: A Follow-Up of a Psychiatric Outpatient Sample.

A one-year follow-up of two hundred psychiatric outpatients was conducted in order to determine the relative efficacy of various treatment modalities in a crisis service unit within the Emergency Room of the Sinai Hospital in Baltimore. It was discovered that improvement at follow-up was related to the amount of medication taken, as well as the duration and type of psychotherapy. Additionally, it is argued that improvement consisted not only in the absence of symptoms at follow-up, but also in "conversion" to more socially acceptable symptoms. Some implications and limitations of the data for the utility of crisis services in general are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]