Community mental health as a reality

In conclusion then, I believe that community psychiatry has been, and is, an important reality which has brought new knowledge and techniques to our profession and which, no matter how one can criticise many of its methods and overly radical ideas, has had its most major effect of psychiatry by just being. It has fulfilled the historical role of all important new movements to provoke a re-evaluation and enrichment of the profession. In essence it is a movement or phase which has made a virtue out of developing a style of service which was required and politically attractive and has exploited that virtue to the full. I believe that the myth will fade as myths tend to do but that there has been a hard core of real contribution to the practice of psychiatry which will persist as an integral part of our field.