Department of Psychiatry
and
Behavioral Sciences
Community Outreach
The University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center has a mission statement that addresses community service and promises to develop programs that are altruistic in their concern for society and incorporate people wholly in their physical, social, and genetic environments. This mission is supported by the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Faculty, staff, students, residents, and fellows are encouraged and supported to express their creativity, professionalism, compassion, and capacity for leadership through community service.
Also, mental health advocacy and consumer groups, patients and family members, and the public regularly are offered community education programs that provide important information on research and treatment of mental disorders. Faculty provide in-service training programs for other professionals organizations and service agencies, including cross-cultural issues for staff at public mental health clinics and mental health forensics issues for law enforcement officials.
Community outreach goes beyond local boundaries. Faculty are involved in health care policy research and in cross-cultural training. The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Harris County Psychiatric Center, and the Mental Sciences Institute co-sponsored the first-ever national symposium that addressed all views regarding involuntary commitment.
Community service is not limited to the United States.
Faculty activities at the international level includes such efforts as consultation and
development of psychosocial rehabilitation programs for victims in war-torn Sarajevo,
Bosnia and former Vietnamese political prisoners as well as ethinic Albanian
refugees. Our faculty have also done extensive community out reach in South and
Central America on depression, suicide and AIDS.
Arc of Greater Houston
(formerly known as the Association for Retarded Citizens)
Coalition for the
Homeless
Mental Health Association of Greater
Houston
Mental Health Mental Retardation
Authority of Harris County
Department of Psychiatry &
Behavioral Sciences Main Page
Last Modified by amd 8/25/99