Le processus de désinstitutionnalisation

The policy of humanization of care given to people suffering from chronic mental disorders consists in maintaining them in their natural environment. The massive development of extrahospital structures and of alternatives to hospitalization allows a reintegration of stabilized psychotic patients. The insufficiency of psychiatric structures due to reduction of beds and that of the duration of hospitalization - for various reasons, whether ideological or economic - condemns the patients suffering from serious mental disorders to wandering and imprisonment. Any absence of social and therapeutic response to the isolation and pathology of de-institutionalized patients poses serious public health problems.