Funding and Deinstitutionalization: The Impact on Minority Community Mental Health Centers

Pierce, William D.

doi:10.1177/009579847800400107

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Considerable federal money was available to establish community health centers, but funds quickly dwindled when it came to staffing them. Westside's Central Office found itself in this situation by 1976 as the original NIHM staffing grants expired (Pierce, 1978, 103). The consortium continues to coordinate services in catchment and the leadership continued to collaborate by creating freestanding think tanks and consulting firms, but Westside no longer provided the same fountainhead for their radical experiments with democracy it once did.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The largest Black‐led community mental health center in the country depended upon support from the federal government in the form of continued NIMH funds for staffing. Director of clinical services William D. Pierce emerged as an acute observer (and critic) of the political economy of community psychology (Pierce, 1978). He rejected weaker concepts like “participation” and “consultation” in favor of fulsome “community control,” which entailed the capacity “to make decisions, set policy, and enforce and monitor priorities.” His reasoning was that “public funds equal community funds” (Pierce, 1975, 36–37).…”

Section: Westside Storymentioning

confidence: 99%

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“Angela's psych squad”: Black psychology against the American carceral state in the 1970s

Pettit

2022

J History Behavioral Science

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This article examines the duality of the Black psychology movement in the United States as both a distinctly American and a postcolonial approach to mental health. The Westside Community Mental Health Center in San Francisco served as the organizational hub for the Association for Black Psychologists (ABPsi) in the 1970s. The Westside clinicians understood forensic psychology as a kind of preventative care as California, more so than any other state, was seduced by the eugenic dream of human improvement through therapeutic interventions in schools and prisons intended to correct the wayward deviant. Their community's mental wellbeing required dismantling the interlinked disciplinary apparatus which disproportionately surveyed, tracked, and confined young Black men. These psychologists mounted a legal challenge to the use of intelligence testing to sort Black children in schools, seeking to replace standardized tests with “dynamic assessments” inspired by Israeli psychologist Reuven Feuerstein's work with refugee children. They consulted on the voir dire process in the highly politicized Angela Davis trial to minimize the presence of racially prejudiced jurors. They offered expert testimony on the psychological damage of solitary confinement on behalf of prison activists. The Westside team artfully developed and deployed the psychological concept of “bias” in their confrontations with local manifestations of the American carceral state. In their theoretical writings, these psychologists reflected upon their historical positionality, understanding themselves as products of the decolonial moment. Bay Area encounters with Third World internationalism, the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Nation of Islam, and community‐led substance abuse programs shaped clinical care at Westside and inspired the Afrocentric consciousness many came to espouse. ABPsi initially had a significant impact on the historically white American Psychological Association's training practices. However, the two organizations split over the IQ controversy at a moment when psychologists became increasingly enmeshed in the criminal justice system

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Westside Storymentioning

confidence: 99%

“Angela's psych squad”: Black psychology against the American carceral state in the 1970s

Pettit

2022

J History Behavioral Science

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“…By 1973, enthusiasm at the federal PETTIT 16 level for community mental health had decidedly waned. Where there had been considerable National Institute of Mental Health money available to establish these centers, funding for their continued staffing beyond these start-up grants proved much more difficult to secure (Pierce, 1978). The Carter administration's Commission on Mental Health launched in February 1977 did something to revitalize this vision of preventative care and structural intervention.…”

Section: Communitarian Moment 15mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Members of the Black psychology movement envisioned them as institutions capable of training a very different kind of professional, one responsible and responsive to their community. This alternative vision for psychology featured prominently in both the 1973 Vail Conference on levels and patterns of professional training (1973) and the Carter administration 's Presidential Commission on Mental Health (1977-1978. However, it was cut short by the electoral victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980, after which the insurance issue became the sole defining issue for the professionals, an obsession that hastened the disintegration of their relationship with academics and narrowed the possibilities of what counted as psychological care.…”

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confidence: 99%

The racial economy of psychological care: Professionalism, social justice, and political action during american psychology’s communitarian moment.

Pettit

2024

History of Psychology

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The 1960s and 1970s saw the overt “politicization” of the American Psychological Association as an organization. Politics in this context carried a dual meaning referring to both political lobbying to promote the interests of psychology as a health profession and grassroots political action to advance social justice causes. In the years between the passage of the Community Mental Health Act (1963) and the Vail Conference on levels and patterns of professional training in psychology (1973), these two forms of politics were intertwined. The first significant political mobilization of professional psychologists in the postwar era occurred over the staffing of community mental health centers in the mid-1960s. These creations of the Great Society social welfare programs provided a platform for pursuing bold experiments in structural interventions to improve the lives and mental health of minoritized Americans and came to serve as hubs for the Black psychology movement of the early 1970s. This alternative model for the profession received careful consideration at the Vail Conference. However, a different relationship between politics and the profession crystalized by 1980. The politics of professionalism in psychology took the form lobby on behalf of practitioners working independent practices to receive reimbursement from third-party health insurance providers. This shift in the political economy of mental health has obscured this earlier, communitarian moment in American psychology. The racial economy of psychology’s professionalization was structural, but not inevitable. It resulted from a series of historical choices.

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Consistently inconsistent: Examining variability in police decision-making in mental health calls using a novel noise audit approach

Wire,

Mitchell,

Schiess

2024

Journal of Criminal Justice

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Funding and Deinstitutionalization: The Impact on Minority Community Mental Health Centers

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

“Angela's psych squad”: Black psychology against the American carceral state in the 1970s

“Angela's psych squad”: Black psychology against the American carceral state in the 1970s

The racial economy of psychological care: Professionalism, social justice, and political action during american psychology’s communitarian moment.

Consistently inconsistent: Examining variability in police decision-making in mental health calls using a novel noise audit approach

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