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T is consistent with the democratic ideal that help for the mentally afflicted I should be available to every individual rather than the privileged few. To achieve that goal we professionals must envision a system of outreach that literally permeates every level of society. We must speed the day when preventive and therapeutic first aid will be immediately available, not only for full-blown syndromes but also for the everyday crises that may be their forerunners. Only then will psychiatry, itself, attain maturity.The Expert Committee of the World Health Organization in 1958 stated that &dquo;the dignity and the right to security of every disabled person is no less than that of a normal individual and that everything possible must be done to rehabilitate the disabled in order to restore them to as normal a life as possible in the society in which they live&dquo;.'3 This includes the mentally disabled as well as the physically disabled.It is no exaggeration to say that current demand for psychiatric service is greater than ever and its prestige is at an all-time high. In a relatively few years psychiatry has undergone a transition from the status of an isolated specialty to that of a major branch of medicine. Reasons: more affluent middle and lower income groups; popularization of psychiatry by mass media and government; accelerated physio-chemical therapy, making it more akin to medicine as a whole; closer socio-psychiatric rapprochement due to escalating pressures at home and abroad; increasing eclecticism within the ranks.All these and other factors peculiar to our complex times have combined to create a veritable psychiatric explosion. To cope with it, the new psychiatric task force will have to expand its horizons. It will have to recruit sergeants and corporals as well as commanding officers. It will have to concern itself not only with theory and etiology but also with the necessity of tiding a patient over his immediate hang-ups. It will have to combine forces with adjunctive disciplines of all kinds in a cross-fertilizing atmosphere of concerted effort. In short we envision a psychiatry that is versatile rather than static, pluralistic rather than insular, liberal rather than conservative, protean rather than stereotyped. Despite resistance from the parochial old guard, the innovative shift from institutional and office-based therapy to domiciliary and community involvement continues to make stubborn headway.

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