Mental health and public health: Strengthening a working relationship.

This paper sets out some reasons for the relatively slight interactions between the fields of mental health and public health. These reasons include the problematic nature of case definition in the mental health field, the vague etiologic concepts in mental health, the stigma attached to mental illness, numerous ongoing professional conflicts, and the perceived failure of the community mental health center movement in the 1960s and '70s. The public health field is, itself, a broad based endeavor which is currently suffering from a large loss of financial resources. This has resulted in public health taking on a defensive posture which is implicitly inhospitable to mental health. The remainder of the paper specifies some areas in which contact between mental health and public health might be most productive, given the reality of the aforementioned constraints.