Community Mental Health Journal

A mental health enterprise may be described by either (a) rather general philosophical total mental health goals, or (b) highly diverse and individualized patient-therapist goals. Goals a. have not provided a workable framework for program evaluation. This paper proposes that evaluation be done in the framework of goals b. by setting up, before treatment, a measurable scale for each patient-therapist goal, and specifying, for each patient, a transformation of his overall goal attainment into a standardized T-score. This method, together with random assignment of patients to treatment modes, was devised to permit comparison of treatment modes within a program, but it also provides a good basis for a judgmental evaluation of the total program.

The authors would like to express appreciation to William W. Jepson, M.D., Program Director of the Hennepin County Mental Health Center, for his considerable contribution to the earlier formulation of the method reported here.