Am J Psychiatry 1992; 149:1455-1463
Copyright © 1992 by American Psychiatric Association
Psychosocial rehabilitation and psychiatry in the care of long-term patients
LL Bachrach
Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Catonsville.
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.
