Lessons From the Program on Chronic Mental Illness

Prologue: In 1986 The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awarded the first grunts 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 program’s 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. (Fall 1992)