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The Community Mental Health Committee (Chair David Cushman, Chiyon Won, Clara Brandt, Daniel Gunther, and Stefania Pifer) is a recently formed committee interested in the intersection between Community Mental Health (CMH) and psychoanalysis. We are excited about the possibilities for increasing the presence of CMH clinicians in NCSPP, and creating avenues for NCSPP to be an ally and advocate for clinicians in CMH settings. In the last year (our first year of existence!) we created a new NCSPP membership category specifically for CMH clinicians. We also held a reading group focused on the work of Salman Akhtar in support of last year's NCSPP Annual Lecture with Dr. Akhtar.
In the New Year, we have begun outreaching to local clinics to gauge the needs of CMH clinicians and how NCSPP can best support and engage therapists doing this vital work. As CMH clinicians ourselves, we have felt the constraints of time and space (literally and metaphorically) that can take hold in community agencies. We are eager to make contact with other CMH clinicians and agencies to learn more about the work they do, the constraints they face, and their existing sources of support and professional development. We hope to learn more about ways for NCSPP to develop programming that would be optimally relevant and useful to CMH clinicians.
We are additionally developing a “Help Line” through which CMH clinicians who are trying to navigate (or challenge) those constraints can receive psychodynamic organizational consultation, support, and referrals. We are thinking about ways to provide support to CMH clinicians through the spacious and thoughtful consultation that is so central to psychodynamic work.
Finally, we are also planning reading groups to accompany Jessica Benjamin's highly anticipated Annual Lecture on Saturday, May 21. We plan to discuss themes of harm, repair, and the implications of the “moral third” in the context of CMH, where the dynamics of clinical care are often complicated by s