This article traces the historical roots of Caplanian mental health consultation and lists nine aspects of the model that have proved valuable over time. A relatively new development, mental health collaboration, is discussed with reference to the internal consultant. The role of mental health consultation in primary prevention is briefly reviewed, and it is argued that consulting psychologists who conduct organization development would do well to consider explicitly the preventive aspects of their work. The paper concludes with some thoughts regarding potential problems of working through intermediary caregivers to achieve the goals of primary prevention.

The genesis of Caplanian consultation occurred in Israel in 1949 when psychiatrist Gerald Caplan, overseeing a small staff of social workers and psychologists, was given the responsibility to care for the mental health needs of 16,000 immigrant adolescents located at more than 100 residential institutions. Caplan soon realized that the usual practice of providing individual client referral/diagnosis/psychotherapy was not feasible, given the substantial number of referrals (about 1000) which were received during the first year, and Israel’s rough terrain and generally poor roads which made it difficult to transport referred clients to a central clinic location.

These circumstances gave rise to an alternative, indirect method of providing mental health services. Rather than meet clients at a clinic, Caplan and his staff traveled to the individual institutions and meet with referred adolescents and with their caregivers to discuss the latter’s perceptions of the clients. These collegial discussions often revealed a caregiver’s stereotyped, inaccurate perception of an adolescent that impeded the solution of presenting problems. Following sympathetic and objective discussion with the staff member, the caregiver (i.e., consultee) often returned to his or her duties with a new perspective and broader range of possibilities in working with the client. In focusing efforts on improving the functioning of caregivers through this method, it was believed that the mental health of many more clients could be improved than was possible through a direct service method.

Although this practice was originally termed “counseling the counselors,”...