ABSTRACT
Until recently, in our thinking and writings about consultee-centered consultation, we felt that two prerequisites were needed to create a viable consultee-centered consultation program for a community agency, The first was salience, which meant that the agency was strategically placed to have a high potential for influencing the mental health of its clients by supporting them in the face of stressors that our studies had led us to believe would produce a statistically significant elevation in rates of psychosocial pathology in an exposed population. Second, we felt that entry to the agency must be feasible; that is, the administration of the agency would understand the need for our service and would have the capacity to make use of it effectively. Because like every other mental health service provider, we have always been limited by available time and by the number of highly trained staff able to carry out so sophisticated a technique, we did not feel it necessary to expend effort recruiting agencies that might well have had high salience, but also had low feasibility because for various reasons they did not welcome our overtures. Indeed, we could pick and choose readily among institutions that fulfilled our criteria, and occupy all our time providing a service that these welcoming agencies felt was benefiting their clients and staff alike.
