Mental health treatment teams and leadership: a systems model.

Mental health treatment teams are living systems at the group level and comprise key productive subsystems of organizations providing mental health care. Effective treatment teams, like effective organizations, are anticipatory systems that contain subsystems that model and predict future system and environmental conditions and enable responses that increase system viability. A systems analysis of treatment teams highlights their potential instability due to their tendencies to regress toward dysfunctional partial systems and their active maintenance in nonequilibrium steady states with their organizational and external environments.

General systems approaches in mental health administration : developing state-university collaboration programs.

Developing state-university collaboration is the process of creating mechanisms to couple two systems for mutual benefit. Collaboration requires setting new organizational boundaries for both the state agency and the university and developing new patterns of information flow within and between the organizations. Each organization's homeostatic properties resist change; this resistance must be balanced by leaders' attention to the organization's developmental needs.

Virginia's experience with state-university collaboration.

The development of an active collaboration between the department of behavioral medicine and psychiatry of the University of Virginia School of Medicine and Western State Hospital is described. The collaboration includes clinical research and opportunities for training residents and medical students. University faculty provide clinical and administrative leadership at all levels of the hospital's organization.

Correlation of parameters of urinary excretion with serum osmolality among patients with psychosis, intermittent hyponatremia, and polydipsia (PIP syndrome).

Nine patients (seven men and two women, mean age 36.3 +/- SD 6.7 years), six of whom had schizophrenic disorders, two of whom had bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness), and one of whom had schizoaffective disorder, manifested psychosis, intermittent hyponatremia, and polydipsia (PIP syndrome).