"Mental Health Without Walls": Community Mental Health in the Ghetto

Group activity and action-oriented therapeutic programs without the "psychiatric" label, particularly those that link meaningful work, compensation, education, and social competency, appear to offer great potential for use in mental health programs in the ghetto. Intervention must be of immediate and recognizable relevance to the pressing life problems of youth and adults and must provide significant incentive to change through achievement and reinforcement of meaningful goals. Development of the program and community and institutional supports required to sustain this change, however, will involve many problems of social, administrative, and institutional resistance. The professional must be a tactful and skillful, but unrelenting, change agent.