THE MOBILE PSYCHIATRIC TEAM: PEACETIME USES FOR COMBAT PSYCHIATRY

A mobile psychiatric team uses techniques which apply the principles of combat psychiatry in the giving of psychiatric care to decentralized or underprivileged populations. By being applied directly in each local area on a regularly scheduled basis, these techniques have several advantages which could be useful to many ongoing civilian and military psychiatric programs: 1) Psychiatric care is made more widely available at decreased expense and with reduced loss of patient time. 2) The "secondary gains" associated with psychiatric symptoms are actively discouraged through local, immediate and expectant treatment measures. 3) The local authorities are offered greater opportunities for using psychiatric liaison and, in turn, the psychiatric team gains a better understanding of the unique problems of the individual group consulted. These direct and mutual interaction processes made possible by the mobile psychiatric team concept, not only improve the practicality of the resulting psychiatric recommendations, but also increase the group's receptivity, understanding and application of these recommendations.