Depression and anxiety now in Emergency Care

Emergency rooms in most bigger cities have a lot of trouble coping with the large group of patients that they have to deal with every day. As the ER (emergency room) is often the first place where people end up when they enter the hospital, a quick assessment of the situation of a patient is often necessary. This means that waiting times have to be short and people need help quickly.

There are many different types of disorders that are diagnosed in hospital emergency departments every day. There are patients that come in that might need a different type of help. Many people come in needing help with problems that are subtle and long term to be suitable for an emergency evaluation, until these problems turn into a crisis situation.

Complaints like the symptoms of hyperventilation and problems that need more research and testing such as vague abdominal pains and other problems that may seem insignificant at first, a general medical test is often the start of getting to the root of the problem.

It is a fact that ER rooms spend too much valuable time on patients that in fact would be better off with psychological help. ER doctors see people with problems such as OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) and other types of mental health problems every day. As the diagnosis of these situations takes too much time this kind of situation may take up valuable time that should be used on serious medical emergencies.

John Swan, working as a practitioner in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has done a lot of research on many types of psychic problems and knows that a diagnosis can be very hard to establish in patients with specific problems. Psychological problems are often a combination of more than one situation and quite often mental health problems combined with anxiety problems are found in people. These patients need more specific treatment than what is offered in ER rooms. Depression and anxiety related problems cannot be treated successfully in ER rooms in the long term.