Address to the Conference on Employee Mental Wellness by Walter B. Wriston, Chairman, Citicorp The mental well-being of employees is a subject of fundamental importance to each of us, our companies, our professions, and the nation. Both the Washington Business Group on Health and Boston University's Center for Industry and Health Care should be commended for the timely initiative this conference represents. I hope it will be come an ongoing effort to improve the mental health services to the nation's private sector workers and their dependents. I have had a deep interest in the delivery of health care for a long time, both from the perspective of a major employer and from my participation in the governance of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. It has also been my privilege to chair the Business Round table's Task Force on Health and to serve on the President's Labor Management Committee which, among other things, has been working on heaith care problems. This experience obviously does not give me any claim to special expertise on the issue of mental health. It may prove helpful, however, as we work together formulating our thoughts about the nation's health system, the role of industry, and where the mental health issue fits into the picture."

The Springer Series on Industry and Health Care is intended to character ize present and future ways in which industry can influence the nation's health care system in the direction of greater efficiency and effectiveness. Its potential audience includes nearly everyone interested in health care because the sys tem's future configuration is now being influenced by corporate health pro grams and the involvement of individual corporate leaders in health affairs. The first volume of the Springer Series provided a broad background on industry as a payer, provider, and consumer of health services. Unlike volumes planned for the future, it did not single out any particular aspect of corporate activity in health but rather identified and catalogued the many new involve ments of industry, both management and labor, in the health care scene. This, the second volume in the series, is designed to complement the first and to complete the process of laying the groundwork for the series as a whole. Volume two covers the same vista as volume one, but paints with a broader brush. It seemed to us, as editors of the series and authors of volume one, that the academic and somewhat distant overview we provided could be rounded out in a second volume by someone with a more immediate and practical perspective on industry's involvement in health care."