Occupational therapists (OTs) play a pivotal role in inpatient treatment settings. While the title "occupational therapy" might initially seem puzzling, its roots are deeply intertwined with the history of psychiatric treatment. In the era before modern psychiatric care, wards primarily served as containment facilities, offering basic necessities but little in terms of holistic treatment. The revolution arrived in the form of occupational therapy, founded on the belief that mental illnesses arose from imbalances between work and leisure.

Like most psychiatric hospitals, yours probably has a policy requiring that you order a lipid panel and a diabetes screen on any patients taking an antipsychotic. While ordering these labs is straightforward, interpreting the results and understanding their implications is key, especially given the metabolic side effects associated with certain antipsychotic medications. This fact sheet delves into what lipid panels measure, why they're important for psychiatric patients, and how to use the results in clinical practice.

SSRIs are the first-line treatment for LLD because of their favorable side effect profiles and because they also help with cooccurring anxiety.

This cheat sheet quickly reminds you of common strategies for managing side effects from psychiatric medications. For more detailed information, refer to our comprehensive fact sheets on each side effect

Evaluating an older patient’s functional status can help you determine which activities they need help with and what level of support they need to be safe. ● It’s done by asking about basic activities of daily living (ADLs) and instrumental activities of daily living

It’s likely you’ll sometimes encounter aggressive or violent situations in psychiatric emergency rooms and inpatient units. They’re part and parcel of the job, but that doesn’t mean you’re left without tools to handle them. Several training programs, like AVADE and Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI), are designed to teach employees how to stay safe in high-risk environments. Surprisingly, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) doesn’t mandate these trainings, but several states do. Regardless of the mandate, sign up for trainings if your hospital offers them and make an effort to engage in regular refresher sessions. You can learn surprisingly effective self-defense techniques in the trainings’ role-playing scenarios. Here are some key points

The use of restraints ensures a quick end to any escalation of agitated or aggressive behavior, but restraint-free approaches can also defuse the situation while safeguarding patients’ safety and dignity

In this fact sheet, we present our approach to ordering lab tests for psychiatric patients, focusing on those most relevant to those newly admitted to psychiatric units. In other fact sheets, we drill down into more detail on specific labs to help you interpret abnormalities (see, for example, …..)

Schizoaffective disorder presents significant diagnostic challenges due to its overlap with both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. It's crucial to obtain as meticulous and reliable a history as possible, although this can be difficult with patients experiencing active psychosis. Ideally, you’ll establish the timing of mood and psychotic symptoms, which is essential for ensuring an accurate diagnosis.

In this fact sheet we discuss when to order and how to interpret a urinalysis in psychiatric inpatients. We won’t cover the urine tox screen (or drug screen) in this fact sheet, as it is already covered in ….