Keeping a Rural Psychology Presence Alive

Rural communities were brought into the national mental health picture in the 1960s in President John F. Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1962. The delivery of services and the human resource application of that act designated rural areas as underserved, in need of some attention. Training programs in psychology, psychiatry, social work, and nursing focused some efforts to produce professional people who could work in the rural environment. As federal initiatives in community mental health have changed, the stimuli for the continued development of rural services have lagged. A thread of concern has lingered, however, as the article by Jameson and Blank (2007) demonstrates.