Abstract
The nation's Number One health problem, mental illness, compels careful reevaluation of past and current methods of attack. It also invites consideration of the ways and means of integrating preventive measures that emphasize the conservation of mental health with prophylactic efforts that stress the avoidance of mental illnesses.
A review of the development of both local and statewide mental health programs in California reveals that three fundamentally different approaches have been used: (1) The traditional approach which confines itself to the protection of society from the “insane” by the state, and to the treatment of those who are not legally insane through “private enterprise”; (2) the public health approach which seeks to minimize the causes and/or spread of selected types of psychiatric disorder regarded as mass phenomena; and (3) the sociological approach which stresses the importance of social factors both in the causation and in the rehabilitation of those mental conditions that are considered to be symptomatic of a “sick” society.
An approach that combines the theoretical and practical implications of all three viewpoints offers some new solutions to the problems of (1) fitting mental health programs to populations; (2) financing; and (3) balancing preventive and clinical services.
Mental illness is not a single disease-entity but a long list of distinctly different conditions. The causes and manifestations are multiple. Biological, psychological and social components in either mental health or mental illness cannot be dissociated in any attempt to understand and deal with so wide a range of illnesses and states of comparative health. Therefore, many professions and multiple public and private agencies are involved in planning, developing and administering a mental health program.
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