[Skip to Navigation]
Article
November 1960

Community Psychiatry as an Opportunity for Medical Leadership

Author Affiliations

Washington, D.C.
Medical Director, American Psychiatric Association.

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1960;3(5):478-489. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.1960.01710050028003
Abstract

By choice and by social pressure, psychiatry, since World War II, has been impelled to lead in, and compelled to share in, a dispersal of responsibility for the treatment and prevention of mental illness among broad segments of the community. This movement, gathering momentum from day to day, harbors within it substantive changes in our philosophy of treatment. At the same time that it harnesses new resources for the battle against mental illness, it raises crucial questions about the roles that different agencies and disciplines will play, and how they shall be trained and utilized, all of which poses a challenge to psychiatric education, for it appears the training patterns of the past will not produce the ideal community psychiatrist. New molds must be designed. While on the one hand striking opportunities for psychiatrists to lead in a fresh and far more promising approach to handling the

Add or change institution
×