Prevention of Psychiatric Illness in the Community: Seeds of Change

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Despite the existence of established risk factors for psychiatric illnesses and a growing number of promising, risk-reducing interventions, the prevention of serious mental illnesses has not been a focus of psychiatric care. This may be, in part, because the majority of such preventive and early detection efforts may need to occur within the communities in which youth or adults who have a particular set of risk factors live, attend school, and work, because such people are often relatively asymptomatic and thus not seeking clinical services. Exciting new opportunities for school-based programs, scalable emerging technologies, “risk calculators,” and successful examples from other fields of medicine suggest that the quality of the evidence and available tools may soon be sufficient to generate widespread support for community-based approaches for preventing serious mental illnesses. [ Psychiatr Ann . 2021;51(6):255–260.]