Social Control and Community Care

Community mental health is often viewed as an alternative to the more segregative forms of treatment/control that prevailed before World War II. It has been regarded as a self-determinate system best characterized by the notions of community care, community treatment, and community control. This paper takes issue with the more traditional understanding of community mental health. Drawing on a historical and political-economic analysis of the wider processes of social reproduction and social control and on a general theory of capitalist regulation, it identifies three processes- expansion, neutralization, and privatization-that link the rise of community mental health during the post-war period to basic tendencies of U.S. capitalist formation.