Letter

Action Plans for Psychiatric Services : Reply

In Reply: Thank you for your kind comments about Psychiatric Services. We try to publish a journal that is both interesting and useful, and we hope that the accumulated scholarship is worthy of summary and implementation.

We support your suggestion for using our published articles to develop an action plan. While it is beyond the scope of the journal to summarize evidence and develop plans of action, others do so periodically. A decade ago the Surgeon General summarized the available evidence for the field in a report on mental health, and many of the research reports cited in the report were from Psychiatric Services. That document provided "courses of action" for improving mental health in the United States. More recent summaries and related recommendations emanated from the President's New Freedom Commission and its call to transform the mental health care system. Let us hope that the new year will bring more excellent papers to the journal and effective action plans to improve psychiatric services, here and abroad.