The development of a psychiatric rehabilitation service: a two year pilot project

Abstract

In the history of psychiatry, one can discern conflicting trends with regard to hospitalization of people suffering from severe mental disturbances. From the beginning of the 19th century, the standard method for dealing with such people has been to take them away from their homes and work and put them in hospitals. However, since the discovery of antipsychotic drugs in the 1950's, there has developed a new movement to treat mentally disturbed people in their communities, either avoiding hospitalization altogether, or at least greatly shortening it. In many hospitals there has been a synthesis of these two trends, reflected in an upgrading of the importance of the rehabilitation function. In Shalvata Psychiatric Center, a medium-sized psychiatric hospital in Hod Hasharon, Israel, a two-year pilot project to introduce a centralized Rehabilitation Service was recently completed. The present Rehabilitation Service is based on the rehabilitation/activity therapy model in which the hospital is conceptualized as a setting in which patients may develop or recover social and vocational skills needed to function adequately in the community. It has drawn on existing, motivated staff from all mental health professions represented at the hospital, and works closely with all in-hospital wards and the day hospital. The authors discuss six areas of vocational and social rehabilitation with which the Rehabilitation Service has attempted to deal: 1. activity therapy/rehabilitation groups, 2. vocational guidance unit, 3. after-care therapeutic social club, 4. in-hospital rehabilitation consultation, 5. liaison activities with community-based facilities, 6. job placement.