Whatever Happened to Community Mental Health? is the story of the beginning of the community mental health movement in the 1960s as displayed through experiences in the inner city of Baltimore in one of the first programs. It portrays bold, groundbreaking initiatives taken by a young staff to deliver services to the impoverished residents while fulfilling their preventive mission. The story is given life in the form of a memoir by one of its earliest staff members and conveys the lessons learned, the viable service model developed as well as the shortcomings of the professional community. The lessons learned are outlined along with the presentation of issues of philosophy and management. Although the movement as originally intended foundered as the result of professional conservatism and changes in national commitments, this book brings the experiences forward in time and demonstrates the applicability of service and consultation activities today as they apply both to treatment and prevention. The implications of this story also serve as the basis for a call for a fundamental re-evaluation of what mental health is and to what it should be committed in the future.
About the Author: Roger Burt, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist trained at Duke University. In 1967, at the end of his studies he took a job in the inner city of Baltimore with one of the first community mental health programs in the country. It was at the height of the reform movement of that era and he thought he was to be employed as a psychologist in a new mental health endeavor. It turned out to be more community organization than psychology. It changed his view of his profession and what it could and could not offer. Much of the work was wholly new and turned out to have implications going beyond the place and time of the program. Later the service model developed was applied by he and his wife, Mala Burt, L.C.S.W., to stepfamilies in crisis. Their experience culminated in their definitive work Stepfamilies: The Step By Step Model of Brief Therapy . Currently Dr. Burt has returned to his "roots" and is a political activist on Maryland's Eastern Shore. With the dawn of a new reform movement in a period of crisis, setting down the experiences in Baltimore with the lessons learned proved irresistible.