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As in any comprehensive study, practitioner-scholars are writing monographs and books with titles denoting some parameters of the field — the politics of pure science, the politics of pot. The current scene with its turmoil over the proper linkage between politics and cancer research, between governmental structure and drug abuse programs, makes it compellingly clear how important it is that we understand that linkage and deal effectively with it.
I earnestly believe that we must face the challenge of the relationship between politics and budget on the one hand and research, education, and service on the other, with new understanding. All are the works of man, the expression of his idealistic and pragmatic innovations.
The triad — research, education, and service — brings to mind a recent celebration of a younger institution — the 25th anniversary of the National Mental Health Act and its offspring the NIMH. On that occasion, many of the people here today and hundreds of others looked back, looked around, and looked forward.
It is this historical continuity that is at the heart of the peculiar title of this talk — “Psychiatry, Through Mental Health to Human Services — What Next?”
During the anniversary, I noted that the men and women who focused their attention on events pre- and post- World War II, talked of psychiatry; to them, psychiatry was synonomous with mental health. Mental health was the broad social movement led by psychiatry and inextricably linked with it.
I noted that contemporary leaders of all ages, but mostly in their middle years, talked of mental health. The professions of psychiatry, psychology, and social work — and other behavioral and social services — took on more or less equal rank as underpinnings of mental health. These scientists tended to use the phrases “mental health” and “behavioral science.”
The younger participants tended to use the phrase and think in terms of some newly forming entity called human services. The last, being the newest, le