The clinical psychologist and work in the District Mental Health Care Team

Abstract

This paper analyzes the relations between clinical psychologists and community mental health teams. Throughout the last 15 years, clinical psychologists have reinforced their position as essential members ofthe mental health team, thus affording it a truly multiprofessional character. However, the article establishes the necessity to go beyond the multiprofesional to the interdisciplinary starting from an understanding of the team as an intermediate technical mechanism between group and institutional level. The group setting, necessary for team development, will facilitate the Pragmatic organization of the work as much as its utopian evolution in the process of recreation of its task. The aforementioned process will serve as training and continued assesment for Professionals, while involving them and giving them a greater role in decision-making and in the organization of their own work.