Whatever Happened to Community Mental Health?: A retrospective set in Baltimore's inner city and a call for a reassessment of mental health

Roger Burt, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist trained at Duke University. In 1967, at the end of his studies he took a job in the inner city of Baltimore with one of the first community mental health programs in the country. It was at the height of the reform movement of that era and he thought he was to be employed as a psychologist in a new mental health endeavor. It turned out to be more community organization than psychology. It changed his view of his profession and what it could and could not offer. Much of the work was wholly new and turned out to have implications going beyond the place and time of the program. Later the service model developed was applied by he and his wife, Mala Burt, L.C.S.W., to stepfamilies in crisis. Their experience culminated in their definitive work Stepfamilies: The Step By Step Model of Brief Therapy . Currently Dr. Burt has returned to his "roots" and is a political activist on Maryland's Eastern Shore. With the dawn of a new reform movement in a period of crisis, setting down the experiences in Baltimore with the lessons learned proved irresistible.