Toward parsimony in the inpatient community meeting on a short-term unit

The role of the community meeting on the inpatient psychiatric unit has been continuously transformed by the radical shifts in the practice of inpatient psychiatry over the past 40 years. The current clinical climate of extremely shortened lengths of stay requires the community meeting to directly address the inpatient unit's primary tasks of stabilization, discharge planning, and treatment compliance and to avoid the regressive effects of large, unstructured groups. In these conditions, an interpretive model of the community meeting, which addresses patients' projections onto staff behavior, seems problematic and not widely applicable because it turns patients' attention away from the adaptational challenges they face from their external social environments. It also places heavy demands on staff time, training, and tolerance.