Rehabilitation: New term for or further development of social psychiatry? A Dutch perspective

Abstract

Social psychiatry as an academic discipline and field of clinical practice seems to have lost its prominence and is being incorporated in regular clinical services of mental healthcare and also in various branches of social, genetic, psychiatric or clinical epidemiology. However, the central debate in social psychiatry from its very beginning on how to care best for patients with severe mental illness (SMI) in the community, what to do with mental hospitals as potentially harmful pernicious institutions or with the hospitalization process, has never lost its momentum even in scientific meetings today. Social psychiatry and rehabilitation share a common focus on these issues, e.g. on independent living and working, on participation in society, and on prevention of hospitalization. Rehabilitation as an ideological and somewhat revolutionary movement of users and professionals in wanting to produce a fundamental change of mental healthcare (e.g. no compulsory treatment) and of society (e.g. elimination of stigma) developed its methods away from medicine and psychiatry and also away from testing these methods. Nowadays we observe growing scientific evidence for various psychosocial rehabilitative interventions which could substantiate the original mission of social psychiatry.