Emergency Assessment

Practise conducting a full psychiatric emergency assessment: from meeting the patient to delivering your plan. Interview, formulate, and communicate — with structured supervisor feedback at every stage.

What you practise

• Conduct a comprehensive psychiatric history in an emergency setting
• Perform a structured suicide risk assessment including risk and protective factors
• Formulate a mental status examination based on clinical interview
• Develop differential diagnoses with clinical reasoning
• Create a biopsychosocial formulation and management plan
• Communicate assessment and plan to patients using clear, compassionate language

Who you can meet

• Carl Eriksson, 22 — First-episode psychosis. Brought to the ED by his frightened parents after escalating aggression, paranoid delusions, and a violent incident. Has never seen a psychiatrist before.
• Ingrid Eriksson (mother), 51 — Collateral history. Carl's mother — anxious, guilt-ridden, with her own history of schizotypal traits and substance dependence. Provides important family context but may filter events through her own unusual beliefs.
• Thomas Eriksson (father), 54 — Collateral history. Carl's father — a university professor. Calm, articulate, and deeply worried. Can provide a clear timeline and observations, though he has been in some denial about the severity.
• Daniel Svensson, 27 — Manic episode with grandiose delusions. University student who believes he is the Messiah. Brought himself in because he is troubled by sexual urges he considers incompatible with his divine identity. Diagnosed bipolar II, stopped lithium one month ago. No insight.

What the feedback looks at

• Comprehensiveness
• Clinical reasoning
• Rapport and empathy
• Communication clarity
• Risk assessment
• Formulation and plan
• Pacing and structure
• Clarity and accessibility

Rated against: These dimensions are adapted from standard teaching on structured psychiatric interviewing and the mental state examination, and from suicide-risk assessment guidance that explicitly rejects the use of risk-stratification tools to predict suicide, notably the NICE guideline on self-harm assessment and management, with Socialstyrelsen's guidance as the Swedish reference point. We are not aware of a single published, validated competence instrument for emergency psychiatric assessment comparable to the rating scales that exist for specific psychotherapies, so this rubric is an educational instrument assembled for this lab rather than an implementation of any one published scale. All wording is adapted and paraphrased, never transcribed from any source. The risk dimension rates the quality of the learner's enquiry only: it is not a risk score, and no number here predicts what a patient will do. Scores are generated by a language model, are not equivalent to the judgement of a trained human rater, are formative feedback for a qualified clinician's own reasoning rather than a clinical or triage conclusion, never gate progression or certification, and imply no endorsement by any guideline body or author.

This lab is for clinical training. The patient is generated by an AI language model from a written case; no real patient and no patient data are involved. Browsing is open; starting a session needs a free account.