Letters

Clinical Case Management, Case Management, and ACT

To the Editor: The authors of the article "Comparison of ACT and Standard Case Management for Delivering Integrated Treatment for Co-occurring Disorders" ( 1 ) in the February issue use the misleading adjective "standard" to describe the comparison intervention. As described in the article, the "standard case management" used was actually a sophisticated "clinical case management team" ( 2 , 3 , 4 ) that provided multidisciplinary, integrated treatment with ongoing expert consultation. The clinical case managers had a larger caseload than the assertive community treatment team, and cases were assigned to individual case managers rather than to a team. However, even with these differences, the clinical case management approach used in the study has much in common with the assertive community treatment model.

Although one wishes that this type of treatment were "standard," case management today too often involves a poorly trained, paraprofessional staff operating apart from other treatment interventions ( 5 ). "Comparison of ACT and Clinical Case Management …" would have been a more apt title for this informative article.