Department News
Carl Bell, MD: Visionary Advocate for Children's Mental Health

If a child comes to the doctor with a rat bite, a good physician cleans and dresses the wound and gives a tetanus shot and antibiotics. But if 50 children come with rat bites and the doctor stays in the office, his license should be revoked for failing to go out and get rid of the rat.

Carl Bell, MD, took that medical school lesson heart and launched his own rat hunt. If high-risk, inner city children could get psychiatric care, he reasoned, they could be shielded from the 'fall-out' of mental illness -- neglect, abuse, poverty, violence and crime.

In 1986, Bell was appointed president/CEO of the Community Mental Health Council, Inc. (CMHC), on Chicago's South Side. He began exploring intervention and treatment available to inner city families. "The infrastructure," he said, "was wholly inadequate."

For example, in 1982 CMHC surveyed 536 South Side children, and found that 25 percent had witnessed a stabbing and 25 percent had seen a shooting. "CMHC serves an important need," Dr. Bell said. "But I felt I was stuck treating rat bites."

He wanted to build a children's mental health infrastructure for Illinois. At the request of Joseph Flaherty, MD, Professor and Head of the Department, Dr. Bell joined the UIC faculty as director of Community Mental Health. Boris Astrachan, MD, former head of the Department, noted that the Department's technological abilities to conduct program research and evaluations could benefit Dr. Bell's initiative, and a partnership was formed. Drs. Bell, Flaherty and Patrick Tolan, Ph.D., director of the Department's Institute for Juvenile Research, solicited support from private foundations, the Chicago Board of Education, DCFS and other organizations. CMHC contracted with Juvenile Court to provide services and evidence-based interventions to help juvenile delinquents conform their behavior to socially accepted standards.

In November 2000, Drs. Bell and Tolan participated in the Surgeon General's Children's Mental Health Conference, which presented a national blueprint for children's mental health services. Encouraged by the concept, they are now striving to link the Juvenile Court and large community-based minority service organizations to form a collaborative treatment collective.

"In ten years we will be better able to quickly identify and adequately treat children's mental health needs," Dr. Bell predicts. "If we don't take the lead now to create future service capacity, Illinois will fall behind -- and won't catch up.

"Neither will our kids," he says. "We need to map the future for children's mental health services, and drive there," Bell says. "To do less is criminal."