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Adolescents admitted to acute mental health inpatient units can experience episodes of distress for numerous reasons. Little is known about how they attempt to cope with this distress. This paper explores adolescent experiences of distress in an acute mental health inpatient unit. Fifty hours of non‐participant observations were conducted and documented using a critical incident technique (CIT) framework. An interpretive descriptive approach was used to analyse the observation data collected. Nineteen episodes of adolescent distress were observed and five themes emerged, of which two will be explored in this paper: clinical contexts and triggers, and coping or help‐seeking actions. The findings of this study will help mental health nurses working on acute adolescent units understand how adolescents attempt to cope with, and seek help for, episodes of distress, and enhance early responses to prevent escalation of distress.

In Oxford, all psychiatric cases among undergraduates are referred by their general practitioners and therefore tend to be selected by them. There is no group they are more ready to pass on to the psychiatrist than the student complaining, in whatever guise, of homosexuality. It is not therefore surprising that homosexuals form a high proportion of the 100 Oxford students referred on psychiatric grounds and studied in the research underlying this paper (the mode of selection is described in Davidson et al., 1955 and Spencer, 1957, p. 93). Opportunity was afforded also for the examination of 100 freshman controls from three Oxford Colleges (for mode of selection, see loc. cit.). These students agreed to answer questions about their sexual development, including possible homosexual practices or interests.

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Parnell (1951) reported that 76 men undergraduates at Oxford had lost a full term's residence on account of psychological ill health in the period of three years from 1 January, 1947 to 31 December, 1949. Psychological ill health had caused 52·5 per cent. of all prolonged absence through illness, a fact which emphasized the need for more detailed study of the causes and possibility of prevention of psychological disturbance. As an indication of minimal current prevalence of such disturbance, it may be reported that 59 Oxford students in need of psychiatric help were referred by their general practitioners to the Warneford and Park Hospitals in twelve months from 1 April, 1953 to 31 March, 1954: these figures take no account of the numbers treated elsewhere; but the evidence as a whole shows that, as found in 1951, mental upset is still the most important cause of ill health in Oxford students.Information derived from a comparison of somatotype, electroencephalographic, psychological and psychiatric findings upon patients and healthy controls is summarized in this paper. It shows that, despite a probable bias in the controls, significant differences can be detected between the two samples. Some of these differences were sufficiently marked to form the basis for a simple heuristic method of detecting vulnerability.