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Lorna Rhodes
Emptying Beds
The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit
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$19.95, £11.95 paperback
978-0-520-20351-8
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199 pages,
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
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.
Lorna A. Rhodes is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington.