Evaluation of priorities in a community mental health center

In an academic department of psychiatry that undertook the operation of a community mental health center, the ideal allocation by program heads of priorities for change in service, education, and research was investigated. It was hypothesized that a productive solution required (a) equal priorities for change in service and education and (b) leadership that had minimal conflict with the different program heads. The department leaders and the heads of programs in service, education, research, and community completed a 90-item structured Q sort on ideal priorities. There was support for both hypotheses. Special consideration was given to a discussion of community involvement in departmental policy making.This investigation was supported by Grant MH 15087 from the National Institute of Mental Health, United States Public Health Service.     

Using the media resources of your community for the promotion of mental health.

The various commercial media offer many possibilities for community education. However, information or counselling columns, literature racks, cable television programs, book lists, recorded telephone messages, and co-operative ventures with libraries are promising tools that are often underused or misused in mental health promotion. This article discusses some practical aspects of using available local media for mental health promotion. Principles highlighted include the following: (1) Positive relationship with commercial media depend on recognizing their needs and accepting their limitations. (2) Receiving information about mental health involves acknowledging personal vulnerability. Information must be presented in as confidential and non-threatening a manner as possible. (3) Non-commercial media for mental health promotion should be exploited.     

A system for allocating mental health resources

A resource allocation model was developed to assist in planning services for the severely mentally ill. Given program objectives and resource constraints, the model employs linear programming methods to find optimal strategies for assigning clients to services. It can also forecast client movement and resource consumption. To field test the model it was applied to a Community Support Program in a predominately rural state. Model results suggest the need for targeting resources to specific client subpopulations.H. Stephen Leff is with Management Research Associates, North Charles Foundation and Harvard Medical School. Stephen C. Graves is with the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Judith Natkins is with Management Research Associates, North Charles Foundation and Psychology Department, Boston University. Jeffrey Bryan is also with Management Research Associates, North Charles Foundation as well as the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology.This research was supported by NIMH Grant No. 1 R01-MH33581-02, a grant supplement from NIMH's Community Support Program, and the Whitaker Health Sciences Fund. The authors would like to give thanks to P. Clark Santos and Maqbool Dada for their help with the computational component of this project, to Mindy Schimmel, Michael Senger, and Marion Bloch for help in reviewing the literature for the transition probability estimation, to Jacqueline Rosenberg, Ronald Manderscheid, Larry Kessler and Rosalyn Bass of NIMH for their support and encouragement, and to Midstate's CSP director and staff for their commitment and collaboration.     

Community mental health centers and community mental health ideology

A study of the adherence of two community mental health center staffs to community mental health ideology, as measured by the Baker-Schulberg CMHI Scale, was conducted. The results for equivalent populations were the same as those of the only previously reported study, indicating the CMHI Scale is a reliable, useful research tool. Significant relationships were found between scores and a) professional affiliation, b) years of liberal arts education, and c) length of time working in a mental health center. Medical education would appear to have a different effect on adherence to the ideology of the community mental health movement than that of liberal arts education.     

Training HIV specialists for community mental health

There is a critical need for trained HIV mental health specialists who possess the knowledge and attitudes necessary to meet the challenges of the HIV epidemic. A model for an intensive and experiential continuing education tutorial is briefly described, and evaluative data are presented. Upon completion of the three-day workshop, participants show an increase in HIV-related knowledge and a positive shift in attitudes regarding working with people affected by HIV disease.Dr. Friedrich is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Mental Health and Associate Director of the USF Center for HIV Education and Research.Dr. Gaies is Staff Psychologist with American Biodyne, Inc., and former Coordinator of the Department's Clinical Tutorial.Dr. Achenbach is Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Mental Health.Funding to develop the HIV Clinical Tutorial was provided under grant #BRT-000044-02-0, Health Resources and Services Administration, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.     

New directions for community mental health centers

Community Mental Health Centers and other quasi-public authorities are operating within a larger health market characterized by the rapid unfolding of a number of key trends in consumer behavior, provider supply, and financing. Each of these trends, though not readily apparent, is strongly reflected in the specialty mental health sector. Mental health managers are faced with fundamental choices about the direction of their respective organizations and the adequacy of their resources to proceed. Mr. Kipp outlines the market dynamics at issue, describes three basic alternatives, and offers some guidelines for management in charting a course.     

Training for research in community mental health

Training institutions need to do a more adequate job in socializing students early and continuously for the role of community mental health researcher. While psychology is singled out to illustrate this thesis, all the disciplines that make up the community mental health team could profitably be examined from this standpoint. The university climate in which psychologists are reared is examined and nuclear shortcomings in respect to basic trust, feelings of competence, and sense of identity are dramatized.This article is a revision of The Psychologist as Community Mental Health Research Specialist, a paper read at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, New York, 1966.