Overview

The restructuring of Mental Health Services approved in 2008 provided for a decentralisation of mental health services in order to allow for closer care to be provided and to facilitate greater participation of communities, users and their families, together with psychosocial rehabilitation and deinstitutionalisation of the severely mentally ill. However, deinstitutionalisation cannot be achieved without creating care alternatives outside psychiatric institutions or by creating false alternatives. For deinstitutionalisation to be successful, the complex nature of mental illness must be recognised (between the biological and the social); mental health care should include dimensions not exclusively clinical (e.g. occupational therapies, socialisation) and patients should be kept, wherever possible, in their social environment and family and other informal carers should be involved in the therapeutic process.

Organisers: Pedro Hespanha, Marília Verissimo Veronese and José Morgado Pereira under the scope of the CES Research Group on Social Policies, Labour and Inequalities (POSTRADE)