ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the historical roots of the community mental health movement in the US. The philosophical and social accompaniments will be articulated, as the situate the movement in highly conflictual premises, prefigured its demise. The internal defect models sponsored by the conservative right advanced the problem of the addict or the psychotic or potential suicide as personally damaged as opposed to implicating deleterious psychological, social, financial, or political vicissitudes. The treatment of psychotic patients relies almost exclusively upon dispensing medication, brief hospitalisation, and perhaps transition to time-limited partial hospitalisation programmes moored in cognitive-behavioural paradigms. Training in psychotherapy was something that was clandestinely “boot-legged” from practising psychiatrists, as up to that point most Ph.D programmes in clinical psychology did not even touch upon psychotherapeutic treatment theories and methodologies. While objections were made on manifestly fiscal grounds, an underlying social agenda and view of government and citizenship were being articulated, derivatively.
