Community Mental Health Committee

This committee is a group of clinicians who are interested in the relationship between Community Mental Health (CMH) and psychoanalysis.  Psychoanalysis is anchored in a quality of close care and attention that is often systematically denied to members of disadvantaged communities and difficult to locate in stressed, under-resourced public mental health clinics.  CMH clinicians hold the tension between a variety of institutional, social, and political pressures and constraints. Meanwhile, psychoanalytic thinking sometimes misses the significance of these systemic influences on individual lives.

There is important work to be done in bridging the theoretical and concrete gaps between community work and psychoanalytic practice. The CMH committee aspires to create a more inclusive home for CMH clinicians within the NCSPP community. In turn, we advocate for greater investment from psychoanalysis in the projects of CMH practitioners- in terms of both theory and practical engagement.

We seek to identify the needs and interests of our various partners both in CMH and NCSPP.  We invite our community members to engage with us by emailing us at cmh@ncspp.org .

Katherine Eng, Ph.D., Chair
Geetali Chitre, Psy.D.
Hoa My Nguyen, LCSW