School of Public Health Will Add Department of Social Psychiatry

Harvard's School of Public Health will add a Department of Social Psychiatry next year.

Dr. John C. Snyder, Dean of the Faculty of Public Health, announced that the new department, to be headed by Dr. Alexander H. Leighton, will be staffed by experts in medicine, sociology, anthropology, and psychology.

The department will:

* develop techniques for evaluating the mental health of populations;

* identify social and cultural factors causing mental disturbances; and

* study the production of social and cultural changes as rehabilitative and preventative measures.

Dr. Leighton is now Professor of Social Psychiatry at the Cornell University Medical College. He is regarded as a leader in attempts to treat mental illness at the community level.

Cornell Deserters

Coming to Harvard with Dr. Leighton will be many staff members and projects of the Cornell Program in Social Psychiatry, which he helped to form in 1958.

A major reason for Dr. Leighton's transfer, he has indicated, is the proximity of various social departments at a number of universities to the School of Public Health. But he said last night that he has not yet had an opportunity to organize projects with social scientists in the Boston area.

The department will offer courses beginning next September, but the program will take several years to develop, Dr. Leighton explained.

During nearly two decades at Cornell, Dr. Leighton has directed long-term investigations in which it was possible to determine the amount of psychiatric disorder in varying ages and among both sexes in whole population groups. He has sought to identify environmental factors responsible for much of the mental illness in his studies in New York City, in Nigerian villages, and in an entire county in Canada.