Fifty years ago Daniel Blain, M.D., had a great notion. APA’s first medical director decided that the Association could provide a valuable service to the cause of improving mental illness treatment by developing a journal that would inform clinicians and administrators about the latest thinking in treatment for the severely mentally ill, most of which occurred in hospitals.

As a result of Blain’s initiative, in January 1950 the first issue of the A.P.A. Mental Hospital Service Bulletin appeared. Over its half-century existence, that publication underwent three transformations and is now the journal Psychiatric Services.

A year and a half after its introduction, the bulletin, which was published every few months, evolved into the monthly journal Mental Hospitals, a name change that its editors thought "more appropriate for a publication devoted exclusively to the improvement of mental hospitals." Blain was its first editor—in addition to being medical director, he headed APA’s Mental Hospital Service—and he soon hired freelance writer Pat Vosburgh to manage and guide the publication, a post she held until her retirement in 1970.

For more than two years, when readers perused their copy of the bulletin and its successor, they were confronted with a front page that consisted of three solid columns of type. One of Vosburgh’s first innovations was to replace this unappealing introductory page with an actual cover. The first issue in which a cover appeared was also the first to contain advertisements. With advertising income in hand, Mental Hospitals grew from an eight-page publication into a 12-page one and by 1954 contained 24 pages. At a time when psychiatric hospitals were a major locus of care, there was no shortage of information to publish.

By the early 1960s, APA had dissolved its Mental Hospital Service, and in December 1963 the APA Council (now known as the Board of Trustees) appointed the journal’s first editorial board.

At the same time, the nation’s system for treating its mentally ill citizens was also changing. Health policymakers in the Kennedy Administration vowed to create a system of community mental health centers to reduce the number of mentally ill patients who had to be sent to distant and sometimes problem-plagued state hospitals for care. New medications were being discovered and treatment reforms instituted that increased the options psychiatrists and mental health professionals could use for seriously ill patients.

To reflect this shift away from state hospitals as the site in which almost all severely ill psychiatric patients were treated, the journal’s board decided another name change was needed. Thus, in January 1966 Hospital and Community Psychiatry was born.

In an editorial explaining the name change, Vosburgh noted, "By 1965, approximately three-fourths of the material [submitted to Mental Hospitals] was concerned to some extent with hospital-community projects. . . . The word hospital precedes community [in the new name] not merely for historic reasons but because the mental hospital itself is in the process of becoming a community mental health center. Hospital and Community Psychiatry will continue to report and assist this expansion into the larger world of psychiatry-where-people-live."

APA Deputy Medical Director Donald Hammersley, M.D., replaced Vosburgh as editor in 1970.

In January 1981 John Talbott, M.D., was appointed editor of Hospital and Community Psychiatry. Talbott, who four years later was elected president of APA and is chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Maryland medical school, instituted a number of changes to improve the journal. He expanded the editorial board from six to 12 members to bring in psychiatrists with additional areas of expertise and in 1983 established an interdisciplinary advisory board made up of social workers, psychologists, nurses, occupational and activity therapists, and, more recently, representatives of advocacy and other professional organizations.

He also strengthened the journal’s peer-review system to ensure that it published papers on timely topics such as HIV. In addition, he began publishing special sections devoted to exploring a particular topic in depth, such as the relationship between homelessness and mental illness, dual diagnosis of mental illness and substance abuse, and the impact of managed care on the mental health system.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Talbott oversaw a years-long discussion over whether to change the journal’s name again to respond to major shifts in practice patterns and service delivery in mental health care. The name on which the editorial board finally agreed in 1994 was Psychiatric Services, its current title. It was chosen because it moved the journal away from a name that linked it to particular treatment settings and signified the broader scope of topics it covers.

Talbott remains the journal’s editor and was recently appointed to an additional term by the Board of Trustees.

In most of this year’s issues, Psychiatric Services will commemorate its golden anniversary by publishing from February through November review articles that look back at critical developments in the mental health field during five-year periods since the mental hospital bulletin first appeared.

Talbott characterized the changes evident in each period as "astounding" and often unforeseen just a few years before. He declined to predict what changes the journal would be chronicling in the next five years, but he was certain that Psychiatric Services would be among the first to present the latest thinking on trends affecting the field. That speed is possible, he explained, because the journal’s purview covers how findings and trends are applied in practice as opposed to more research-oriented journals, which have a longer peer-review process before a report appears.

"When new developments appear, we’ll document them quickly and report them early and accurately," he told Psychiatric News.

While published by APA, Psychiatric Services is not a perquisite of membership, but is available through a paid subscription, which costs $51 for U.S. subscribers and $74 for those in other countries. It is, however, provided free to psychiatry residents. Overall, about 40 percent of its 20,000 readers are psychiatrists, noted Teddye Clayton, who has been the journal’s managing editor for 25 years and plans to retire in June.