Lessons from the Program on Chronic Mental Illness

Prologue: In 1986 The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awarded the first grants under its Program on Chronic Mental Illness, which funded service demonstrations in nine cities to combine scattered services for the mentally ill into a central authority. Since then, the programs multidisciplinary national evaluation team, led by Howard Goldman, has been collecting data and anecdotal evidence on the program s impact in the nine cities. Although the final data will not be available until the end of 1992, Goldman and his colleagues offer this "evaluation without the numbers." They are convinced, Goldman states, that the program s greatest significance has already been realized: "that the problem of caring for individuals with severe and persistent mental illness has remained part of the public consciousness and has been placed before the mainstream of health and social policymakers," Goldman, who is principal investigator for the program evaluation, is professor of psychiatry and director of the Mental Health Policy Studies Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Joseph Morrissey is professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Susan Ridgely is a research associate and associate director of the Mental Health Policy Studies Program at the University of Maryland. Richard Frank is professor of health economics in the Department of Health Policy and Management, School of Hygiene and Public Health, The Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. Sandra Newman is a research professor and associate director for research at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies. Cille Kennedy is a research psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health.