had known that consultant and had had previous contacts with individual students. When I crossed the threshhold of the Indiana School for the Blind in 1986 I was already schooled in the Caplan (1971) theory of consultation, the frustrations of inter-institutional cooperation, the lure of exalted expectation, 14 years of treatment-based reality in addressing the mental health needs of children and families, and the building of consultation services in the early days of the community mental health movement in Indiana. History of Psychiatric Consultation to Schools Psychiatric consultation to schools and other community institutions was given emphasis by the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963 (P.L. 88-164), which mandated consultation to community caregivers as an obligatory basic service. The philosophy of child consultation in its purist form implies that the "expert "never sees the child. The child and his or her plight are always abstracted through the eyes of those individuals who care for him or her, their supervisors, the