Mexico's San Rafael Community Mental Health Center: six years of progress.

In February 1975 Calderdn and Elorriaga published an article in the Boletin de la Oficina Sanitah Panamericana (2) describing a program of community mental health, one focal point of modern psychiatry, directed at incorporating this branch of medicine into the field of public health from which it had tended for many years to remain aloof. The article noted that this transformation was being accomplished on a large scale by the highly developed countries with substantial budgetary resources, and in the socialist-bloc countries with an abundance of trained manpower able to extend mental health benefits to all inhabitants. However, developing countries such as Mexico are handicapped by economic restraints and trained personnel shortages; and this makes it necessary to draw on foreign experiences adapted to our prevailing political, economic, social, and cultural conditions. Our goal, set from the beginning, was to maintain program activities at a high level of technical proficiency without the aid of special funding. The idea was to try and attain suffcient coordination between the private sector, already existing government resources, and institutions of higher learning to accomplish the program’s aims. Within this context it was hypothesized that if periodic evaluations yield-