nity (later Psychiatry) at its founding in 1844 that public action (i.e., government sponsorship) was necessary for organized treatment of mental diseases.
Vourlekis, Edinburg, and Knee (1998, p. 572) explain the so-called aftercare movement, the name given to the therapeutic services undertaken by social workers to help integrate the mentally ill, many of them indigent, who were released from state hospitals, into mainstream society. Aftercare as an institutional feature of mental-health systems was partly an outgrowth of activities on the part of a loose coalition of Progressive Era advocates. The term itself was derived from Britain, where there was a so-called After Care Society in place by the late 1880s. Important in the development of social-worker presence in American community mental-health systems were the reform efforts of Louisa Lee Schuyler, a New York social welfare activist who adapted the methods and protocols of the British After Care Society in the project of lobbying for New York's State Care Act in 1890 (Vourlekis, Edinburg, and Knee, 19
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