Community mental health: A review

Community mental health is the public health aspect of the mental health field. It is inhabited by a variety of mental health professionals in addition to psychiatrists; but it is inhabited also by social scientists, economists, politicians, social reformers, ex-patients and their families, and ordinary citizens. It needs to be differentiated from community psychiatry (which is the kind of psychiatry practiced by social system-oriented psychiatrists) and social psychiatry (which is really an interdiscipline in academia, comprising social scientists and psychiatrists who are concerned with understanding the ways in which behavioral science data illuminate human behavior, ordered and disordered). Community mental health has developed in full form largely in the past two decades, although its roots go far back in history beyond our own era. The particular themes which are intertwined in the matrix of community mental health are: (1) moral treatment, the focus on humane and humanistic approaches to the mentally disordered, and protection of their rights as citizens; (2) prevention of illness or of its consequences, the preventive medicine of psychiatry; (3) new developments and improvements in the techniques of clinical services in mental health care; and (4) The social concept of the right to health care, as it pertains to mental health programs and needs. The process by which these themes have been interwoven is one which has gone on at both federal and state-local levels, but the more enduring and significant process is that at the state-local level, as most extensively exemplified in the California system.