This chapter addresses three themes relevant to the coordination of care between the emergency medicine and psychiatry clinicians: who is involved in the coordination of care; creating a coordination team; and the benefits of nonclinical interdisciplinary collaboration. Coordinating care with mental health professionals suggests the challenge of understanding who's who, and who's likely to be doing what. Creating an effective team requires additional steps, including assessing the availability of willing resource-partners, recognizing the abilities and liabilities of those resource-partners, and designing a model for coordinating care. These themes were chosen to highlight differences in culture, training or approach and may provide providers with the clarity to decrease interdepartmental frustrations and improve patient outcomes. In addition to coordinating patient care, collaborations between psychiatry and emergency services can be helpful for growing departments in several ways including through education for capacity building, research initiatives, and improving well-being and morale.

Emotions and emotional feelings arise through the integrated processing of bodily sensations, environmental events, thoughts and recollections, and they shape new learning, facilitate decision-making, and guide behavior. Mood and affect have been defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) according to the durations of the emotions and emotional feelings comprising them. The development of functionally impairing pervasive and sustained disturbances of emotion and emotional feelings suggests a mood disorder such as major depression, dysthymia, mania, hypomania, or cyclothymia. Functionally impairing moment-to-moment disturbances of emotional expression and experience are disorders of affect. This category of clinical conditions includes disorders of affective excess such as pathological laughing and crying, pathological euphoria, essential crying, witzelsucht, and affective lability. The phenomenologies of emotional generation, expression, experience, and control reflect their putative neurobiologies. MacLean applied the principles of evolutionary neurobiology to the description of the limbic system and its function.