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.Abstract Teaser