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For several years, there has been an increasing number of emergency psychiatric services. Their purposes and ways of working can be very different from one to another. This article describes in the first place the various units existing in France, and will then focus on one, ERIC, which intervenes at patients’ homes and offers a crisis support beyond emergency. Two case reports illustrate this work. The advantages of this unit are essentially its ability to cope with a large variety of situations, its acceptability by patients, their families and their primary networks, the fact that it offers a real alternative to psychiatric hospitalization, and the experimentation and training opportunity that it offers. The difficulties the professionals are confronted with are the burnout syndrome and the risk of violence. From this experience, we propose a model of organization for emergency psychiatric units.