The admission and short stay department of a General Psychiatric Hospital (GPH, in Dutch: APZ) is considered as a suprasystem for the patient, comparable with the family. It can often be observed that in the departments the same interactions develop between patients and personel, as are common in the family between family members. The present article proposes a treatment program that guides these interactions. The treatment program is based on Brown's concept of Expressed Emotion and its application by Anderson in his structured psycho-educative family therapy. Some modifications are introduced to adapt the therapy tot the situation in a department. The goal of the treatment is to lower the Expressed Emotion of the personel to the patient. This choice is corroborated by findings that identify high Expressed Emotion as an important factor in recidive psychiatric illness. It is hypothesized that the effect of Expressed Emotion is indifferent as to wether it occurs in a short stay department of a GPH or in a patients family.