ABSTRACT
The community mental health center movement had been heralded as a revolution by its founders. Many had envisioned the movement as producing a rational system of care, one which moved away from psychoanalytic psychotherapy for the wealthy and custodial care in large state institutions for the poor. During the era of the 1950s and early 1960s, public health psychiatry at the federal level flourished under the influence of key psychiatrists and federal legislators. The vision of community mental health centers during this period was one of community workshops for public health psychiatrists. By the mid to late 1960s it became clear that the centers would not be staffed primarily by psychiatrists, let alone psychiatrists trained in public health psychiatry. A century and a half ago Marx argued that the ruling ideas of an age were the ideas of the rulers.
