The Perils of Outreach Work

Abstract

As the doors of mental institutions closed behind the thousands of patients who once roamed their corridors, the streets of urban centers around the country became open-air wards for unmedicated and untreated mentally ill people who numbered among the many homeless and destitute in the city streets. This product of failed social and political policies required the development and implementation of new intervention strategies for workers who provided the population of homeless mentally ill clients with sorely needed treatment and support services. This worker became known as the “outreach worker.”