ABSTRACT
The long history of the relationship between adolescent psychiatry and public education is marked by a kind of reciprocal ambivalence, varying in intensity over time, from mutual neglect to territorial conflict. Over the past 30 years, educators and psychiatrists as professional groups have experienced many changes in the scientific, social, legal, economic, and political environments in which each must carry out its mission. Psychiatry has weathered the community mental health and patient advocacy movements, a nosological revolution, an explosion of knowledge in neuroscience and psychopharmacology, the rise and fall of proprietary psychiatric hospitals, deinstitutionalization of the seriously and persistently mentally ill, and, not least of all, the headlong implementation of managed care currently under way. Public education has borne the brunt of the burden of regressive social anomie in our inner cities—poverty, racial conflict, high crime rates, alcoholism, drug addiction, and family and youth violence—while enduring unendingly shifting pressures for change, including such trends as site-based school management, school improvement modeling, mental health and substance abuse curricula, community services programs, and federally mandated special education services to disabled or handicapped children. Although psychiatrists and educators have always been invested in producing healthy, well-educated, productive citizens, both have usually been too preoccupied with the vicissitudes of their own professional domains to see the larger picture of their shared common purpose, let alone come together and work synergistically in its service.
