Special section on assertive community treatment: an introduction

The central idea of assertive community treatment was that a community-based team would provide a full range of medical, psychosocial, and rehabilitative services, analogous to care in a hospital, to prevent hospitalization of clients by maximizing their skills and supports in the community.

Abstract

No psychosocial intervention has influenced current community mental health care more than assertive cornmunity treatment. During the early years of deinstitutionalization, when many people with severe mental illness failed to achieve stability in the community and cycled in and out of hospitals, a variety of communitybased interventions evolved. By far the most carefully defined, well documented, and successful of these interventions was developed in Madison, Wisconsin, where a group of clinicians and researchers established an intensive program of community care (1) that has since become known as assertive community treatment. The central idea of assertive community treatment was that a community-based team would provide a full range of medical, psychosocial, and rehabilitative services, analogous to care in a hospital, to prevent hospitalization ofclients by maximizing their skills and supports in the community. The model assumed that bringing care to the patient would obviate the problem of missed appointments and that skills learned in a naturalistic setting, rather than in the hospital, would be more likely to persist.