Through a large number of psychiatric emergencies (540 under age 18 in 2001), we explore the relation between the passage to the act and the emergency situation in adolescence: doesn’t modern psychiatry tend to define a psychiatry of the act ? The latter depends on internal causes at adolescence, but also on the environment. The work with these situations is then defined both by the constitution of an emergency service as an interior setting and by the development of an exterior network. The evolution of a ward for dealing with psychiatric emergencies in adolescence can thus be described.

Adolescence, septembre 2002, 20, 3, 571-579