Planning for early treatment psychiatric services.

The concept of "psychiatric first aid" or early treatment psychiatry is not new. Such services have existed, in some measure, in various medical settings: general hospitals, private psychiatric practice, and psychiatric receiving hospitals. What is relatively new, however, is the idea of developing a service program with early treatment or immediate care as its central focus; in other words, to develop a crisis-oriented psychiatric program for a large community. Both the Committee on Public Health of the American Psychiatric Association and the Joint Commission on Mental Ill-