Psychiatric Administration Research Articles

Psychiatric Administration: A Comprehensive Text for the Clinician-Executive

Drs Talbott and Kaplan introduce this 410-page edited volume by informing the reader that this text is a combination of their long years of practical experience and an attempt to give structure and new meaning to their experience. They remind readers that since World War II, psychiatrist-clinicians have become executive policy makers in large organizations, which are subject to unpredictable, and often uncontrollable, internal and external forces. Drs Talbott and Kaplan note that they, along with their peer group, had little or no formal training in administration. Their training has been on the job or, rather, in the battle field. In my experience, the fortunate psychiatric administrator has had a mentor or preceptor who served as a role model. Psychiatric administration has been passed from teacher to student via the oral tradition. The value of this volume is that it converts the best of the oral tradition to brief, well-written

Teaching psychiatric administration to senior residents

This article describes a course in psychiatric administration, given by the authors as part of a “standard” psychiatric residency training program. The course combined both didactic and experiential learning for senior residents performing administrative duties for the first time. Details of each week's seminar are included, and the authors discuss evaluations of the course by both teachers and students, as well as the changes that occur within the resident group participating in it.

Leadership in mental health: changing the guard for the 1980s.

The author reviews the leadership changes that have taken place in mental health organizations and the factors that have influenced these changes as the mental health field has developed. The administrators of the early mental hospitals were physicians and laymen. By the mid 1840s, the physician-administrator had become dominant, but this changed with the social values of the 1960s and the growth of community mental health centers. Most recent has been the movement into leadership positions by professional administrators without clinical training. The author suggests that the mental health leaders of the 1980s must understand that administration is substantially modified by the subject matter and the values of the mental health field. He feels that the administrator must never lose touch with the experience of being a patient.

The Psychiatric Resident Learns Administration

The Psychiatric Resident Learns Administration

The Evaluation of the Plymouth Nuffield Clinic

practice therapies without requiring first a demonstration that they work, and that they are likely to prove useful only so long as the physician believes that they will. It was not psychiatry that called forth either of these rebukes, yet in that field they apply with especial force. For, although psychiatrists have become sensitive to the need for elaborate and contrived clinical trials of somatic treatments, the sweeping changes in psychiatric administration initiated in the last 20 years, the extensive reforming procedures within the mental hospital, and the measures adopted to extend extramural and community care, all remain untested. They have taken root and spread more because of the crusading enthusiasm of their protagonists than because anyone has shown that they work. Why should the innovator1 who has lighted on and developed a new idea-the open door, group therapy, early discharge, home visiting, whatever it might be-desist from expounding its principles? He is convinced that it is effective. It is effective, very often, when pursued with his zeal. To test it would be a work of supererogation. Moreover, it would scarcely be practicable; it would involve setting up criteria by which its success could be assessed; it would in-

The Incidence of Volvulus of the Sigmoid Colon and Its Treatment in a Psychiatric Veterans Administration Hospital—”The Bedford Syndrome”

The Incidence of Volvulus of the Sigmoid Colon and Its Treatment in a Psychiatric Veterans Administration Hospital—”The Bedford Syndrome”

The inadequacy of present-day concepts of mental deficiency and mental illness in child psychiatry.

1. A survey of patients with severe disorders of mentation indicates that we are dealing with an "organic" brain syndrome in which the failure of mentation is due to factors that interfere with the proper function of the central nervous system. We are dealing with "symptomatic" mental conditions and behavior patterns that vary greatly in their psychiatric manifestations. The only essential difference between mental "deficiency" and mental "illness" lies in the time of onset. If one wishes to restrict the term mental illness to those conditions in which there existed a period of mental health before onset, all those disorders that are of a prenatal, developmental, or traumatic and vascular character, connected with the process of birth, could be classified as mental deficiency. As soon, however, as the posttraumatic, post-infectious, and metabolic syndromes of infancy and childhood are included, such distinction cannot be maintained. This would have important legal consequences as all such patients would h...