The purpose of this research is to examine current and fu ture trends affecting the field of mental health. The plan of the research will be to set forth courses, patterns, and implications of changes in mental-health theory and practice, and then to dis cuss in particular the importance of technology, especially the multifaceted information explosion, and the issues of hyperspeci alization and subspecialization in the psychology disciplines.
To examine current trends in the mental-health the oretical and clinical discipline, it is useful to look at the just-pre ceding period to see how present views have been arrived at. In deed, there is evidence that competing theories have char ac ter ized mental health disciplines from the beginning. Fromm-Reich mann cites Freud's view that neuroses are sex-centered and that once underlying or repressed trauma is discovered and faced, they can be cured and Adler's rejection of sex orientation in fa vor of systematic analysis of environment and relationships. She says Freud "was the first to understand and describe the psycho thera peutic process in terms of an interpersonal experi ence be tween patient and psychiatrist," (1950, p. 3), but else where says "there are no physical symptoms without emotional con com i tants and no mental disorders without somatic concomi tants or causes."
By the 1980s, the tendency to understand interaction between and among mind, body, and environment had so increased that a majority of clinical psychologists described themselves as having integrative or eclectic theoretical treatment orientation, though the content of the term was in dispute. Theory work has continued into the 1990s, and it has remained controversial. Howev1er, commentators appear to acknowledge that psychiatry and other avenues of the mental-health discipline are consciously undergoing formal redefinition. The question, they say, is not
whether there will be a redefinition of the field, ...