Whatever Happened to Community Mental Health?: A Retrospective Set .

Sometimes, the better way to design for the next is to hear from the past. For those in the mental health profession, that thought can be especially useful, believes clinical psychologist Roger Burt. By presenting a see at Baltimore`s community mental health campaign in the 1960s, he describes a groundbreaking initiative that still holds lessons for today, and even more importantly, for tomorrow.

Burt became partly of the move in the later 1960s, around the sentence that he was completing his Ph.D. work at Duke University. He united a program administered by the University of Maryland, excited by the larger mission of helping those who were disenfranchised and impoverished.

Not hanker after, he became entangled in the academic politics there, seeing the beginning real disconnect between on-the-ground community mental health workers and the institutions that supposedly aimed to keep them. Despite those challenges, though, a true reform was first at the time, fueled by passionate clinicians and community organizers. "Such movements attract particular kinds of long and dedicated people," writes Burt. "And so we clung together, determined to make a scheme which would do a seriously disadvantaged population."

Of special concern to those in the mental health profession, Burt gives comprehensive details near the case of healing and service issues they encountered, and emphasizes that the community health model was but just being developed at that time. Classical psychotherapeutic intervention and analysis was however in style to some degree, and to make a more workable program, those in community mental health had to design new forms of services, especially around creating more trust between clinicians and their clients.

Burt also includes the case of challenges faced by faculty members and professionals, including feelings of personal inadequacy, over-identification with clients, and "liberal guilt." In looking back, Burt notes, "Community mental health was a bold experiment that in all likelihood was lost to go from the beginning." But he doesn`t think that it was a scourge of time, especially as a new reform effort in healthcare and mental health seems to be just beginning. He asks, "Could we be look at an opportunity for a new chapter in the rescue of mental health services?"

The point of examination Burt provides in the Baltimore example of community mental health should be a blessing to any psychologist, therapist, or administrator who`s looking for new ideas about mental health delivery. This is a name for mental health professionals to get a new see at the past, and mine it for future possibilities.