The Kedzie Center: Bringing Psychoanalysis to the Community

Carl Sandburg's “Chicago” (1914) still sings, “so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning,” but when it comes to care for the emotional well-being of its chorus, Chicago has historically turned its brawny back on those who carry the “terrible burden of destiny” on theirs. This neglect is not new, but has accelerated greatly over the past decades. Further, attention to disparities in the quantity of available treatment—for instance, the fact that Chicago's former mayor, Rahm Emanuel, closed half of the city's remaining community mental health centers with the sweep of a pen in 2012, or that the ratio of therapists to residents in wealthy neighborhoods is more than twenty times higher than that in low-income ones (Quinn, 2018)—has been accompanied by, and has often obscured, an interlocking issue regarding the quality of the therapeutic resources provided. Yet disparities in the quality of treatment should be equally obvious; those without means more often encounter longer wait times for—and little to no choice in—therapist assignment, intermittent sessions, frequent therapist turnover, and short-term, symptom-focused interventions provided by overworked, poorly-paid staff. In Chicago, psychotherapy is least available to those who need it most and least substantive, and although the same can likely be said of community services in all US cities, “in Chicago there's been an intentional [emphasis added] disregard for investment in these areas” (, as cited in Quinn, 2018).

Enter the game-changing Illinois Community Expanded Mental Health Services Act (), which went into effect in Illinois in 2012, just as existing mental health centers were being shuttered. Essentially, the Act takes mental health funding out of the hands of city and state budgeteers and places it directly into those of each affected community itself, represented by an appointed panel of Commissioners that includes neighbor