Community Psychiatry

Abstract

In all psychiatric literature, the word ‘community’ has appeared with increasing frequency for some years now, though this does not imply that there is any general agreement about its meaning in this connection. Very often, it is simply taken as equivalent to ‘outside mental hospitals’ and in the United States has commonly meant no more than providing psychotherapy under different financial arrangements from those of private practice. Sometimes it is used to refer to the whole of psychiatry and sometimes to a sub-speciality within it, though current British practice certainly assumes the former of these. A related concept is that of ‘social psychiatry’, which indicates the application of relevant scientific disciplines to the core of clinical psychiatry, or study of the interaction between social and clinical events; these disciplines include sociology, anthropology, statistics and economics. The result of this interchange is a practice of psychiatry greatly influenced by knowledge of social systems and of the epidemiological trends of disease.