RESUMO
Two situations, which may of course interfere, are described in the field of psychological and psychiatric emergencies in child and adolescent: 1) therapeutic emergencies, true emergencies, linked to acute mental suffering or even distress in the child which it is important to relieve quickly. They are not always the object of an acute request for medical care, and when such a request is made, it is rarely based on what the child feels, but much more on noisy or troublesome behaviour or somatic manifestations of the latter, this last possibility producing a masked psychiatric emergency very characteristic of this age; 2) environmental emergencies represent a second form of emergency, defined by a situation which appears when the child's family or tutors suddenly decide that they can no longer face such a behaviour or such symptoms in the child. Intolerance then appears, or even rejection of the child from his home. The authors were led to determine this double dimension, concentrating their attention on the first few years of life, childhood from 4 to 5 years to 11 or 12 years and adolescence. Insisting on the dual necessity, even in emergency cases, of sufficient reflexion and necessary concentration of interest on problems as they are presented by the family, the authors describe the various stages of an emergency: entering into contact, evaluation of the situation, choice of the emergency procedure: gaining time or admission to hospital in a specialized unit. They end by taking into consideration the fact that one is never sufficiently attentive to the child himself and to his own way of dealing with the situation.