Self and Illness: Changing Relationships in Response to Life in the Community Following Prolonged Institutionalisation

Abstract

Increasingly since the 1950s mentally ill people in the Western world have been removed from institutional care. In this paper I am concerned primarily with the response of psychiatric patients to living in a ‘normal’ community environment, in particular the extent to which they are able to assume new social roles and identities after long periods of institutional care. I conclude that despite persistent mental illness, deinstitutionalised patients have developed new roles and new identities, a new sense of independence, new coping abilities and a capacity to articulate future goals and desires.The findings are drawn from two and a half years fieldwork in an Australian capital city, where a group of long‐stay psychiatric in‐patients, who would not normally be considered for discharge, were given the opportunity to live in mainstream society. This accompanied the reduction of in‐patient beds and the eventual closure of a large psychiatric hospital as it amalgamated with another hospital nearby.