Mental health planning and problem-solving in the 90s: satisficing rather than optimizing during a time of turbulence.

This paper describes one aspect of a community demonstration project in Rochester, New York, which attempted to downsize a state hospital while expanding community services for individuals with serious mental illnesses. In order to successfully transfer resources from the institution to the community, private sector administrators and planners needed to modify some of their original plans based on the realities, constraints and politics of public sector systems. It is suggested that this type of compromise is well documented in systems theory and is of importance to mental administrators and planners as we try to serve more needs with the same or fewer resources during the decade of the 90s.