The chronically ill patient.

Psychiatry's renewed interest in its identity as a medical specialty and its increased therapeutic armamentarium make its involvement with chronically medically ill patients more feasible than ever before. These patients face problems which include economic ones, conflicts between independency and dependency, those connected with self-image, intra-family stresses including sexual ones, social isolation and the threat of death. Patients respond to these stresses with psychological symptomatology which includes depression, suicidal behavior, anxiety, delirium, dementia and psychosis. The treatment of the consequences of these stresses is the daily work of the liaison psychiatrist.