Descriptive studies of a crisis intervention service replicated previous findings of relationships between staff members' attitudes towards treatment and their ‘personal styles'. The attitudes and personal styles of crisis team members and non-members differed, largely because of differences in the professions making up these groups. While all staff groups shared the same concept of crisis, they differed in their discrimination of crisis cases from ‘furores'. Initial crisis intervention interviews exhibited more confrontation and less exploration by therapists than did initial psychiatric out-patient clinic interviews. Patients referred to the crisis team differed from significant other people in their lives, and from control patients referred to the ordinary out-patient clinic, in aspects of their perception of problems.