Bob Dorwart's Legacy

Abstract

Bob Dorwart’s legacy is in part the work he left behind, such as published papers and books for researchers, policy makers, and scholars to review, mull over, and utilize in their work in expanding new knowledge for mental health services. His legacy, however, is much more than a large Medline search result. It is his impact on the collaborative efforts of clinicians and researchers to improve patient care, whether those efforts explicitly acknowledge his research or influence opportunities for treatment in a more indirect way. The enduring impact of anyone’s legacy is difficult to measure, especially if one only tries to follow a trail of publications. A legacy is also people who have benefited from their encounters with Bob, the exchange of ideas among colleagues, and the many meetings, seminars, and national symposia. It is the encouragement, advice, mentorship, and critique in an immediate interpersonal sense which creates a memory of Bob that makes an abiding impact for many years to come. Bob Dorwart left us a rich legacy of ideas and people. He was an early leader of mental health services research, devoting himself for almost two decades to the question of how psychiatric systems influence opportunities for patient care. He was fascinated by the organization, regulation, ownership, and financing of psychiatric systems, and he enlarged the scope of how we study such systems and change them. As Mark Schlesinger puts it, “Robert Dorwart’s research focused on the implications of institutional change for the practice of psychiatry” (p. 216). He combined the perspective of a superb clinician with an investigator’s passion for how things work in the real world and also how they may be improved. His work spanned studies on citizen participation in community mental health, to the privatization of psychiatric