The Extended Home Visit: A Pilot Project to Determine the Usefulness of the Three-Hour Home Observation in Assessing the Deleterious Effects of a Severely Disturbed Parent in Three Families, Division of Social and Community Psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, New York, 1964

Background of the Study. The growing national concern for problems in the mental health field was both reflected in, and stimulated by, the late President Kennedy\u27s message to congress on Mental Illness and Mental Retardation , on February 5, 1963. The message not only decried the lag and neglect of current prevention and treatment of mental disorders but laid down specific suggestions for the prompt treatment and rapid reintegration of the mentally ill into their communities. In part, the President said: I propose a national mental health program to assist in the inauguration of a wholly new emphasis and approach to the care for the mentally ill. This approach relies primarily upon the new knowledge and new drugs acquired and developed in recent years which make it possible for most of the mentally ill to be successfully and quickly treated in their own communities and returned to a useful place in society. These break-throughs have rendered obsolete the traditional methods of treatment which imposed upon the mentally ill a social quarantine, a prolonged or permanent confinement in huge, unhappy mental hospitals where they were out of sight and forgotten. If efforts are to be made to prevent this alienation of the patient from his community, his family and his friends, they will undoubtedly involve a comprehensive mental health center in each community, including diagnostic services, emergency care, treatment on both in- and out-patient basis, facilities for day and night care, as well as many other adjunct community resources. Whether or not such community centers will replace today’s mental hospitals is debatable, but it is most significant to note that the psychiatric day hospital has been suggested with ever increasing frequency in the past decade, as at least a partial solution to these problems in the treatment of the mentally ill