Community Screening for Mental Illness

Community treatment of mental illness.

THE isolation of the mental hospital, which was practically absolute before the Mental Treatment Act of 1930, is rapidly disappearing, and more and more psychiatric patients are being treated in the community instead of in the hospital. The hospital’s first link with the community was the outpatient department. Later liaison was gradually established with outside services such as probation depa...

Family and community responses to mental illness.

Cultural groups respond differently to mental illness depending on the explanations of the cause, attitudes in the community toward mental illness and its treatment, and the social and community resources available to patients and their families. Our column last month explored these explanations and attitudes. This column focuses on family and community treatment of mental illness and the care ...

Community attitudes to mental illness in Edinburgh.

Screening for serious mental illness in the general population.

BACKGROUND Public Law 102-321 established a block grant for adults with "serious mental illness" (SMI) and required the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to develop a method to estimate the prevalence of SMI. METHODS Three SMI screening scales were developed for possible use in the SAMHSA National Household Survey on Drug Abuse: the Composite International Dia...

Assertive community treatment for elderly people with severe mental illness

BACKGROUND Adults aged 65 and older with severe mental illnesses are a growing segment of the Dutch population. Some of them have a range of serious problems and are also difficult to engage. While assertive community treatment is a common model for treating difficult to engage severe mental illnesses patients, no special form of it is available for the elderly. A special assertive community tr...