Community spaces and psychiatric family care in Belgium, France, and Germany

Abstract

This chapter describes the development of psychiatric family care in various different cultural contexts. It examines Germany and France and their respective processes of interaction with a Flemish model institution of family care. As a travel destination for many psychiatrists the Flemish village of Gheel became a kind of metaphor, or even a synonym, for psychiatric family care. The chapter discusses the importation of scientific knowledge from Belgium and its transfer into the French and German contexts respectively. In France and German-speaking countries, various pressure groups and professionals provoked a debate about psychiatric patient care which was often similar in tenor and content, but which led to the use of the community’s space in different ways. Almost all the German family care programmes that originated around the turn of the nineteenth century were described at the time, as in the French case, as implementations of the Belgian model.