RÔLE OF THE PUBLIC HEALTH NURSE IN COMMUNITY MENTAL HYGIENE

Abstract

IT IS becoming a little easier, I think, to see what the personnel of the mental hygiene movement will probably be. In the past it has not been easy to see sometimes because we have been in a developmental stage, but it looks now as though the mental hygiene movement, in its personnel aspects, would follow very much the same lines, with some modification, as the field of general public health. The general public health movement is professionally led by specially trained medical men, or even more specially trained non-medical men, such as the doctors of public health, with the nurse as the public health officer's chief assistant in the community. He may receive some assistance from the social worker and if he is to succeed in his work, he must eventually have the co6peration of parents, and teachers, and finally of even the school children themselves. I believe that, in the way of personnel, mental hygiene work will follow much this plan. Mental hygiene work must be professionally directed by specially trained medical men, known as psychiatrists, or by specially trained non-medical persons, known as psychologists, or possibly eventually by a third type of person not now available who will be a still more precisely trained person, combining the elements of both psychiatry and psychology in his training, but who, at the end of the training, will