Administration and policy in mental health

Conclusion

The upshot of these needs for change is both dismaying and exciting, both disturbing in the destruction of long-familiar patterns of dealing with human suffering, and paradoxically hopeful in raising the possibility that significant failures in our health care systems of the past — limited access to medical care and grossly inadequate public sector “non-systems”, for example — may now be addressed more successfully.

The mounting complexity of our field suggests that these substantial gains will come only as a result ofcoordinated efforts that recognize the importance of a systems perspective — about our field, about ourselves and our relationships with our colleagues, and about the nature of mental illness itself.

If these efforts are to produce better answers than the ones we now have, the taks of managing these systems will fall heavily upon administrators and leaders of a new kind: broadly conceptual managers who have successfully combined a sophisticated knowledge of planning with a sophisticated understanding of treating mental illness. Our task in the meantime is to figure out how to develop the managers our future requires.