Policies and Practices of Psychiatric Case Selection

This paper describes the factors affecting how psychiatric emergency teams (PET teams) evaluate and responded to, legitimated or discounted, the calls of community members. Such calls were processed on two distinct levels-the psychiatric and the practical. PET teams had a variety of policies and procedures for assessing the psychiatric "seriousness" of a case. On many occasions, however, the psychiatric ordering would be subordinated to organizationl and personal factors. The paper concludes with a consideration of structuralfactors which promoted this subordination of psychiatric to pragmatic criteria for selection.