Psychiatric care and communities

Psychiatrists have been concerned with communities both as settings for the lives and treatment of their patients, and as human organizations which have characteristics that can be studied, understood, and modified by the concepts and strategies developed in more traditional psychiatric work. Our growing understanding of psychiatric disorders has increasingly emphasized their chronic course with long periods of premorbid predisposition, inter-episode vulnerability and post-episode sequelae, and the role of the community as a social context with stressors, protectors, and critical variables which often dwarf the power of our therapeutic interventions.