Professors To Serve on Carter Board

A Medical School professor and a Graduate School of Education (GSE) professor will serve on President Carter's newly-formed Commission on Mental Health, the White House disclosed Tuesday.

The professors are Dr. Julius B. Richmond, chairman of the department of Preventive and Social Medicine and professor of Child Psychiatry and Human Development, and Charles V. Willie, professor of Education and Urban Studies at the GSE. They will work with 18 others on the commission.

Work on the commission--a series of three or four two-day meetings--will not interfere with the professors' commitments here, Willie said yesterday.

The executive order that established the commission in February says the commission should try to identify the nation's mental health needs.

These Are Orders

Specifically, the order asks the commission to determine:

How the federal government is aiding the mentally ill, emotionally disturbed and mentally retarded, and to what extent they are being underserved;

The projected need for the government to deal with emotional stress in the population during the next 25 years;

Various ways the President, the Congress and the federal government can most efficiently support treatment for the underserved mentally ill and mentally retarded;

Various methods for coordinating a unified approach to all federal mental health and people-helping services;

The types of research the federal government should support to further the prevention and treatment of mental illness and retardation;

What role the various educational systems, volunteer agencies and other people-helping institutions can perform to minimize emotional disturbances in this country; and

As nearly as possible, how much future programs will cost, and how the financing should be divided among federal, state and local governments, and the private sector.

The commission will submit a preliminary report to the President by September 1, and will submit a final report by April, 1978, the presidential order said.

Richmond co-designed the Neighborhood Health Center program for the Office of Economic Opportunity in the mid-'60s and funded the federal Head Start program.

Willie, a former research sociologist with the New York State Mental Health Commission, is a consultant to the Center for Minority Health Programs of the National Institute of Mental Health.

The new commission held a preliminary meeting Tuesday with Rosalynn Carter, its honorary chairman, and will hold its first formal meeting April 1.