What do psychiatric emergency patients really want and how do they feel about what they get?

Psychiatric emergency patients range along a continuum from persons who present to the service with specific requests for help, to individuals who are brought to the service in handcuffs against their will for reasons they do not understand. In addition, studies suggest that psychiatric emergency patients' wishes and expectations often fall outside the traditional framework of psychiatric assessment, are not straightforward or concrete or are not accurately perceived by the clinicians who see them. How these factors impact on patient satisfaction with the treatment they have received is not well-understood, because the manner in which specific patient variables and treatments might relate to patient satisfaction among the psychiatric emergency service population has not been systematically studied. In contrast, psychiatric inpatients and outpatients usually express positive attitudes about their mental health care, although this finding may be skewed by a lack of real anonymity. Chronic patients tend to express less satisfaction with their treatment programs than do others, and patient satisfaction in some studies has been related to patient demographics, diagnoses, treatment histories and patients' global rating of treatment outcome.