On Beyond Mental Health Centers:  A Planning Model for Psychiatric Care

COMMUNITY psychiatric planning requires a conceptual model broad enough to encompass all levels of mental health services and to foster integration between psychiatry, socioeducational services, and the rest of medicine. Thus, the model should facilitate coordinate approaches to such targets as neighborhood health planning, high quality acute psychiatric services, prevention programs, humane but economical chronic care; and to specialized care for such categories of patients as children, the mentally retarded, drug abusers, alcoholics, etc. Critics^1-3 of community psychiatry point out its failure to provide the degree of excellence in services that might be anticipated. Others,^4-6 have sought to improve the model by clarifying its boundaries, programmatic roles and loci, goals, and historical antecedents. Linn has defined community psychiatry as the theory and practice of psychiatry as it applies to the principle of districting.⁷ Some of the disillusionment with community