Psychosocial rehabilitation and psychiatry in the care of long-term patients

The relationship between psychosocial rehabilitation and psychiatry in the care of long-term mental patients is one that may often be characterized, at best, as an uneasy alliance. The author summarizes the basic concepts that define the discipline of psychosocial rehabilitation and discusses how those concepts have at times been distorted in actual practice. The article concludes with an analysis of the two disciplines' common ground in caring for long-term patients and a commentary on the benefits that each may offer the other. Together psychiatry and psychosocial rehabilitation hold the key to improved circumstances for realizing the promise of deinstitutionalization, which seems largely to have eluded us for the past several decades.