INTRODUCTION OF PREVENTIVE PSYCHIATRIC CONCEPTS INTO A PROGRAM OF TOTAL CHILD CARE

In September, 1955, the Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, University of Utah College of Medicine, decided to introduce into the routine well-baby clinics the psychiatric discipline, and thereby to establish a total care clinic for children. This action was motivated by the common dream of the prevention of mental illness and the promotion of mental health. It was based on the conviction that child psychiatry now possessed a body of knowledge that could be used to develop preventive techniques that this knowledge should be applied in infancy and early childhood and that it was logical to incorporate preventive efforts into the routine medical care of infants by pediatricians and general practitioners. The investigative interest was paramount and there was considerable concern about designing the project so that it would meet some of our current ideas of good research. The setting was a routine teaching clinic operating as part of the outpatient department of the Salt Lake County Hospital. The authors approached the task of prevention with a set of assumptions that we believed represented a distillation of child guidance principles. Experience in this clinic has led to two major conclusions. First, it seems possible for a physician under ideal conditions of motivation, training and setting to influence the development of an individual child favorably by influencing the child-rearing practices of the mother and other members of the family. The second major conclusion derived from these efforts is that the medically derived concept of mental illness is a sterile one from the point of view of investigation of the so-called psychogenic factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)