Integrating Complexity and Infant Mental Health for Comprehensive Community Change

Efforts emerging throughout the United States and at the federal scale suggest that there is a readiness for new perspectives on mental health and community change. Complexity and infant mental health have been developing as fresh orientations within the fields of systems theory and mental health, respectively. Through Sarasota Community Studio, residents of the CentralCocoanut neighborhood in Florida are now combining the key principles of complexity and infant mental health and applying them to place-based efforts to develop a new model for transformative change and well-being. This paper highlights features of the current U.S. policy landscape that signal a readiness to address community transformation, identifies key principles of complexity and infant mental health that make these orientations especially relevant to transformation, presents Central-Cocoanut as a community case example of efforts to apply complexity and infant mental health, and begins to explore the implications of a new model for transformation that is emerging at the neighborhood scale.