Strategies to Help Manage the Agitated Patient

 How to manage the agitated patient?That’s the subject of this brief podcast. The speaker is Scott Zeller, MD, chief of psychiatric emergency services at John George Hospital in Oakland, California, and the immediate past president of the American Association for Emergency Psychiatry.Dr Zeller presents on this topic at a course entitled “Emergency Psychiatry: Triage, Evaluation, and Initial Treatment of the Crisis Patient” at the American Psychiatric Association’s Annual Meeting in New York City.Agitation is a spectrum of symptoms . . . it can go all the way from being irritable up to pacing to lashing out to clenched fists to outright violence. Intervention via de-escalation techniques at an early stage is optimal.Here: Dr. Zeller outlines 6 basic goals of intervention.