The uncomfortable community meeting and the privacy-urgency coordinate: discussion and case study.

The authors review the literature and describe factors contributing both to the value and to the discomfort of community meetings on an adolescent inpatient unit. The defensive use of an exaggerated estimation of meeting discomfort is discussed, and the concept of a "privacy-urgency coordinate," useful in analyzing group dynamics, is introduced. A case example illustrates the importance of balancing the need of patients for privacy with their need to resolve urgent problems on the unit.