What the neighbors think: community attitudes toward local psychiatric facilities.

We conducted a telephone survey in three boroughs of New York City to assess the impact of proximity to psychiatric facilities on attitudes toward the mentally ill. Six pairs of areas were selected for sampling; within pairs, one area included a facility serving chronically ill psychiatric patients and the other contained no health or mental health facility. Three-quarters of those living within a block of the selected facilities were found to be unaware of their presence. Further, attitudes toward mental illness and patients were not related to proximity to such facilities. These results cumulatively suggest that community psychiatric facilities do not necessarily constitute a personal or community burden as far as the neighbors are concerned.