Editor's Introduction

Although managed care's mandate to contain spiraling costs in the arena of mental health has arguably yet to lead either to less waste or to more effective therapies, the dominance of the managed care paradigm for the provision of services no longer appears to be in question. In fact, managed care comes very close to defining the practice climate of the 1990's; and this, to a large degree, appears irrespective of the context of one's clinical practice. One of the more curious and regrettable responses to the ascendancy of managed care as a model for the provision of mental health services has been the relative absence of sustained vigorous debate in the field of social work, particularly among social work educators. At times, it seems that we have been much too willing to adopt a strategy of accommodation. For example, if time-limited treatment has been determined by managed care to constitute the modal approach to psychotherapy (a determination whose motives might rightly be questioned), then social work curricula should be revised accordingly; if behavioral change is valued over intrapsychic change, then methods and research courses should emphasize assessment tools and clinical methods that are supportive of this ideology; and so on. To be fair, some have questioned the wisdom of our rush to “partner” with managed care, especially when such partnering