Social and Community Psychiatry

Our department has played a major innovative and leadership role in the evolution of Social and Community Psychiatry as a subspecialty area in our field.  Some of the services pioneered or substantially developed within this department include:

• Day hospital
• Community mental health centers
• Storefronts
• Mental health advocacy
• Community residences

• Sheltered work
• School consultation
• Prison mental health programs
• Family-based community clinics
• Homeless shelters

This tradition continues in an exciting range of areas emphasizing the comprehensive care of defined populations at risk. Starting with an epidemiologic base, residents learn preventive efforts with community and family groups and review service delivery systems. Supervision covers evaluation, research, fiscal concerns and cultural dimensions. Residents examine the context in which people live and service is delivered. Resources used include:

• Intensive case management teams, which offer comprehensive care of chronic patients and innovation strategies of psychiatric rehabilitation;
• Forensic psychiatry, affording experience in service delivery issues, suicide prevention, careful neuropsychiatric diagnosis and substance abuse issues;
• School-based services for adolescents with psychiatric difficulties, including consultation to staff, supervised clinical groups and program development;
• Refugee clinics, offering a review of the refugee experience and evolving concepts of post-traumatic stress disorder, and collaboration with ethnic communities on culture-based healers;
• Liaison to primary care medicine, including the teaching of nonpsychiatric physicians, the planning of medical self-help groups, and designing primary prevention programs.