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This publication, by the American Psychiatric Association and the National Association for Mental Health, in association with the Division of Community Psychiatry, Columbia University, and the Department of Mental Health, American Medical Association, consists of fifteen chapters, of which four define, summarize, and compare mental health centers; the remaining chapters describe in detail eleven centers in the United States and Canada. The study, which is clearly written, should be of assistance to those charged with planning and coördinating psychiatric programs.
The community mental health center is a development of the last decade. The authors remind us that the knowledge from military psychiatry gained in World War I was ignored in planning for neuropsychiatric casualties in World War II. Today, the community mental health center movement attempts to avoid a similar error by coördinating and improving existing services and filling gaps without duplicating services already in existence. Law provides that these centers include five essential elements: inpatient services, outpatient services, facilities for partial hospitalization (such as day hospitalization), emergency services, and consultation