ABSTRACT
The concept of mental health in a community would seem to demand two things — that individual members of that community should be themselves stable, secure and settled; and that the community pattern itself should be a mentally healthy one. Thus the presence of the socially maladjusted, the social misfit, looms large in the problem of community mental health. Some local authorities have accepted that challenge and begun the slow but steady building up of a real community care service. Community care methods call for special skills and training which almost the prerogatives of the psychiatric social worker are at present. The teaching of social science students in the basic values and techniques of the psychiatric approach leads to one startling and rather alarming result. So many students tell you in later years of the opposition and frustration they met in practice from their seniors or their committees towards their use of this approach.
