PSYCHIATRIC DIRTY WORK REVISITED:

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Abstract
Observational data show that staff and trainees at a community mental health center (CMHC) considered the tasks of servicing outside nonpsychiatric agencies (prison prerelease, welfare, and homeless) to be “dirty work.” These providers believed that such work was not appropriate, was not under their control, and restricted their professional autonomy. Clinicians disliked filling what they saw as social control functions. They also considered such tasks to be a waste of sparse psychiatric resources. These staff attitudes are largely the result of a retreat from earlier community mental health approaches that fostered a broad array of psychiatric concerns. Rather than dealing with a wide range of social problems, staff prefer to focus on conditions they define as narrowly psychiatric.

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