The college as a psychiatric workplace

This paper examines how the interplay of certain characteristics of institutions of higher education and of professional and psychiatric orientations results in a role for the college psychiatrist that is excessively overdemanding. To reduce the resulting role strains practitioners use a number of concepts and practices which have important consequences of the type of service given. Moreover, these modes of adaptation to workplace requirements generate social and ethical problems which need to be resolved if college psychiatry is to be a forceful agency of human assistance in the colleges of the future. Our analysis of college psychiatry is based on a sociologically informed review of the sixty years of professional literature devoted to the subject and on the detailed examination of the functioning of one college psychiatry service over a period of three years.