Abstract
When social control and social service workers go into the field, into the “native habitat” of some problem, a variety of tacit structures and controls that mark office work with its standardized documents and formal meetings are weakened or absent entirely. As a result, compared to office settings, social control work in field settings tends to become open, contingent, unpredictable, and on occasion even wild. This article provides a strategic case study of the distinctive features of social control decision-making in the field, drawing on observations of field work by psychiatric emergency teams (PET) from the 1970s. PET typically went to the homes of psychiatrically-troubled persons in order to conduct evaluations for involuntary mental hospitalization. This article will analyze the varied, situationally-sensitive practices these workers adopted to evaluate such patients in their own homes.
Highlights
This article will analyze the distinctive features of doing psychiatry in home and field settings, focusing on a historically remote but relatively unalloyed form of psychiatric homework—that practiced by psychiatric emergency teams (PET) in private homes in the early 1970s
In California, PET was created in response to the closing of the large state mental hospitals and the turn toward community mental health
Mental health clinics in the US cities provide crisis intervention through visits to field settings and a variety of innovative treatment programs, such as the Open Dialogue Approach originated in Finland, rely on mobile crisis intervention teams (Seikkula & Olson, 2003)
Summary
This article will analyze the distinctive features of doing psychiatry in home and field settings, focusing on a historically remote but relatively unalloyed form of psychiatric homework—that practiced by psychiatric emergency teams (PET) in private homes in the early 1970s. Mental health centers in Los Angeles organized two-person psychiatric teams to go out into the community in response to citizen calls for crisis intervention and mental hospital evaluation. These units functioned as psychiatric gatekeepers under California’s Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) Act passed in 1969. We will analyze the distinctive contingencies of decision-making grounded in homes and other non-institutional settings, thrown into high relief by PET interventions
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