The empty lot: Passage of a mental health center through a black American Urban community

Summary

American psychiatry and academic psychiatric departments currently have a diminished role in the direction, staffing and training of community mental health centers as compared to the beginning of the center movement two decades ago. Lacking sufficient psychiatric staffing, the poor and disadvantaged populations served by these centers will continue to receive inadequate mental health care. Many academic psychiatry departments consider community mental health centers to be administratively and fiscally burdensome. A frequent issue has been the problematic relationship of psychiatrists and academic psychiatry departments to community mental health center boards — particularly boards dominated by disadvantaged minority groups. However, accurate reports of these psychiatry-community board relationships are not readily available. This paper will report and analyze the organizational history of a mental health center with an active minority-dominated community board. Based upon this case study and the review of relevant literature, the author concludes: 1. Urban community mental health boards controlled by black minority members can support comunity-wide mental health service programs that are both relevant to expressed community goals and are of high professional quality. 2. Leadership crises arise from staff conflicts and not staff-community confrontations. 3. Leadership crises resulted from the ill-defined relationships of Center supporting agencies to the organized communities. 4. Community boards must have clear and legitimized relationships with other supervising organizations if they are to effectively and constructively participate in Center governance.