What Are Professors of Psychiatry For?

THE DEMANDS for psychiatric manpower to implement the extensive functions currently expected from the professionals concerned with mental health and illness are rapidly increasing. So many new activities are supposedly "musts" in the expanded mental health fields that we are hearing more and more about the training of "subprofessionals." These pressures should have had their effect on leaders in the field, the professors of psychiatry. But where are they and what do they do?

It would be assumed that they are scholars, investigators, or teachers who have reached their eminent positions on the basis of consistent contributions to some aspect of the field. Unfortunately, this is not so—they are mostly younger men, presumably welltrained in outstanding institutions, and chosen to fill the large number of new posts because they give promise of future productivity, or at least because they can serve as