Accompanying two decades of change in the mental health system have been a diffusion of the roles and practices of mental health professionals as well as shifts in the public's perceptions of the various specialties. In the present study, samples of patients and nonpatients used a 4-point Likert scale to rate (a) the competence of psychologists, psychiatrists, nonpsychiatric physicians, and the clergy to treat 10 different patient types, and (b) the personal qualities of the four practitioner groups along nine different dimensions. Psychiatrists and psychologists received significantly higher ratings than both nonpsychiatric physicians and the clergy on competence to treat most menial health problems. Intergroup differences on the ratings of personal qualities suggest a less uniformly favorable perception of psychiatrists and psychologists in comparison with the other two groups. Implications for the marketing and public relations efforts of mental health practitioners are discussed.Since World War II, members of the various mental health professions have experienced dramatic shifts in their respective roles, responsibilities, and public image. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, "the decades of the 1960's and I970's exceed in intensity, magnitude, and swiftness anything seen in the prior history of mental health care in the United States" (Taube, Burns, & Kessler, 1984).
The controlled study presented here was designed to examine the influence of the degree of structure of a coping-orientated therapy, the changes between the beginning and the end of therapy concerning satisfaction with therapy, psychopathology, attitude towards medication, coping behaviour and social variables, the effects on the days of hospitalisation within one year after the end of treatment and the relevant variables to predict the outcome twelve months later. It could be shown that patients in a relatively unstructured supportive group therapy wished to discuss topics that are very similar to those of coping-orientated therapy, that coping-orientated therapy results especially in an increase in knowledge about illness and treatment and that the therapeutic outcome after a one-year period can best be predicted by the degree of active coping strategies, social adaptation, trust in medication and cognitive variables.
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