Inside Public Psychiatry

Given the current implementation of mental health parity in insurance benefits and the enactment of healthcare reform, this book is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand both the historical context of public psychiatry and what the future might hold. Most people with serious mental illness are seen in the public sector of psychiatry, and the significance of psychiatric treatment in the public sector is best understood one person at a time. This book tells the story of public psychiatry with examples from the author's experience running Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC), one of the country's premier public mental health centers. It covers four major periods in modern public psychiatry, bringing the reader up to the present and providing a view of future directions. CMHC is unique in that it is an academic community mental health center affiliated with Yale University School of Medicine. Because CMHC has provided a successful community psychiatry program for over 40 years, it serves as a case history of modern public psychiatry since 1966. This book also informs practice and policy formation for public psychiatry and provides a perspective on services in the public system, a discussion of several key policy issues, and how these will influence future policy and, therefore, practice. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care legislation of 2010 has been incorporated to bring the book up to the moment.