Leaving the psychiatric hospital

In Argentina, deinstitutionalization and community-based mental health care are almost inexistent and large psychiatric hospitals with inpatients interned for decades are still the norm. Some professionals are working from within the institutions in order to make a gradual change on this situation. But how, in the Argentinean context, can long-term psychiatric inpatients leave the asylum and integrate in the society? This book narrates the stories of women and men who spent most of their lives interned and who have recently moved out of a neuropsychiatric hospital. It also describes the externación programs that made this movement possible and the place of the hospital in the process. Through an ethnographic perspective, the book shows how ex-patients lives are not lonely, isolated, empty, and lacked of socially valued roles and productive activities as the literature on deinstitutionalization in the United States and other countries usually describe. For coping with poverty and scarcity of community-based resources they involve in survival strategies, social networks, and participate in the “outside world” integrating aspects of the “psychiatric world” of the hospital that they have constructed as a multiple resource. This book is directed towards social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists and others working or interested in the field of mental health.