Therapeutic Group Approaches in Community Mental Health.

The article presents information about therapeutic group approaches in community mental health. This paper deals with the varicolored spectrum of group influence attempts that lie outside the more strictly clinical range of group psychotherapy. Recognition is the proved potency of these approaches in counteracting the noxious influences noted and in enhancing mental health and rehabilitation need not lead to an obliteration of the distinction between them and traditional group psychotherapy. One could argue to the contrary that a comprehensive view of all treatment modalities in the framework of planned intervention measures aimed at restoring adaptive in place of maladaptive social functioning only heightens the need for concise diagnostic assessment and treatment methods. This has been demonstrated in relation to crisis intervention and short-term psychotherapy in which "an orderly and integrated series of concepts" and methodology are considered even more necessary than in long-term treatment. The greater the need for flexibility in goals and innovations in methodology encountered in the context of a community mental health center, the greater the necessity for conceptual and methodological clarity and order.