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Lorna Rhodes
Emptying Beds
The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit
$21.95, £15.95 paperback
978-0-520-20351-8
Available Now
199 pages,
April 1991, Available worldwide
Categories: Anthropology; Medical Anthropology; Psychiatry; Social Problems; Health & Medicine
April 1991, Available worldwide
Categories: Anthropology; Medical Anthropology; Psychiatry; Social Problems; Health & Medicine
Free online edition (eScholarship)--available only to University of California faculty, staff, and students (List of public titles)
"[A] compelling ethnography of an acute psychiatric unit. . . . A fascinating account that describes how the staff of such a unit managed briefly to treat and then 'place' the often poor and destitute emergency patients."—Bruce Link, Contemporary Sociology
"Rhodes' observations are couched in the theroetical formulations of Michel Foucault. . . . The description of the unit's activities are bloodcurdling and funny and precisely accurate. . . . Emptying Beds is a readable, accurate, and alarming work of anthropology."—Frank S. Pittman III, American Journal of Psychiatry
"Rhodes' observations are couched in the theroetical formulations of Michel Foucault. . . . The description of the unit's activities are bloodcurdling and funny and precisely accurate. . . . Emptying Beds is a readable, accurate, and alarming work of anthropology."—Frank S. Pittman III, American Journal of Psychiatry
The work of inner-city emergency psychiatric units might best be described as "medicine under siege." Emptying Beds is the result of the author's two-year immersion in one such unit and its work. It is an account of the strategies developed by a staff of psychiatrists, social workers, nurses, and other mental health workers to deal with the dilemmas they face every day.