Redressing the Emperor: Improving Our Children's Public Mental Health System

Lyons provides a fresh and thought-provoking understanding of the children's public mental health system, as well as the need to foster its evolution and improvement. He presents the history of child mental health systems, including the U.S. system's roots and the early 19th-century case of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, which demonstrated the potentially therapeutic effects of environment. He shows us why modern leaders and Presidents have issued calls for improvements to the country's child mental health system, and what barriers have slowed or even halted this evolution. Such barriers, Lyons explains, can be removed with community development and better clinical outcomes management.

JOHN S. LYONS is Professor of Psychiatry and Community Medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and Director of the university's Mental Health Services and Policy Program. During the past two decades, he has studied the mental health service system, and he has developed outcomes management tools and strategies that have been implemented in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles and four books.