[Splendor and misery in the local organization of mental health: a look at the field].
Collaboration among public and community resources (or concentration as it is referred to in French) is a practice much favoured by governments for ideological and economic reasons. But if administrative collaboration is relatively easy to set up, what about collaboration among front-line field workers? What are the ingredients likely to engender true collaboration among practitioners, and what obstacles do they meet with on a practical day-to-day level? Experience acquired in the West Island area of greater Montreal has led us to the conclusion that many issues need to be examined and understood: the difficulty of reconciling client empowerment with treatment; the difficulty of harmonizing the values and convictions prevailing in institutional and community-based networks; the tendency for practitioners to keep clienteles for themselves within a treatment environment. Despite these difficulties, it is evident that there will be a trend towards increasing collaboration where clienteles are growing and where problems are becoming more complex.