Deinstitutionalization, in sociology, movement that advocates the transfer of mentally disabled people from public or private institutions, such as psychiatric hospitals, back to their families or into community-based homes. While concentrated primarily on the mentally ill, deinstitutionalization may also describe similar transfers involving prisoners, orphans, or other individuals previously confined to institutions. The transfer of individuals to families or community-home settings, which tend to be less restrictive than institutions, is thought to benefit individuals by allowing them to be active participants in their communities.

Institution and deinstitutionalization as concepts

Although there is debate among sociologists, an institution may be defined, very broadly, as a social group’s way of acting, thinking, or behaving, in which behaviours, customs, and practices become crystallized, or established. Institutions are distinctive, recognized, and sanctioned. In this sense, a psychiatric hospital may be understood to be an institution in that it embodies all of the customs and practices that accumulate around psychiatric care. Deinstitutionalization, then, occurs when a complex of customs, structures, and activities is modified or loses its reason for being. With regard to the mentally or physically disabled, deinstitutionalization is less the disappearance of institutions or specific assistive resources than the mutation of institutions and resources to meet new social demands and a new historical context.

Psychiatric deinstitutionalization

Concern about patients in psychiatric hospitals emerged in the 19th century, when signs of patient neglect in asylums became apparent. In the 20th century, overcrowding and patient abuse became serious problems, leading some to search for community-based alternatives to institutionalization.

There were several principal factors in psychiatric deinstitutionalization in the 20th century. For example, there was an influx of psychotropic medications that better permitted the mentally ill to regain a life among others and to overcome what had been called “crises.” New medications raised the possibility of excursions, light physical activity (e.g., walking), and reimmersion in the community. The insane gradually came to be seen as mentally ill, experiencing “psychological problems” or “psychological suffering.”

The influence of psychoanalysis, which introduced a noninstitutional type of therapy, was also a factor in deinstitutionalization. “Madness” had been addressed in an institutional framework—that is, in a context in which institutionalization was supposed to cure, or at least relieve, it by means of its own internal dynamic—application, internal socialization, and work. The supposed curative effects of institutionalization were complemented by various techniques, such as electroshock therapy. In the 1960s and ’70s, institutional psychiatry had a vision where psychoanalysis had a recognized place. Ultimately, however, psychoanalysis contributed to the emergence of the concept of deinstitutionalization, since work on the psyche could be undertaken outside an institution.

Psychiatric deinstitutionalization was also influenced by the so-called antipsychiatry movement. From 1950 to 1970 the movement emphasized the role that social factors played in psychological disorders. It focused on social pathologies and on the deindividualization of mental illness (abandonment of individual values in an effort to identify with one’s society). At the same time, this movement held that connection to the community offered the best path toward amelioration and affirmed that institutional confinement was fundamentally harmful.

To these factors must also be added economic analyses. In the United States and France, for example, the thesis was advanced that the welfare state, by developing segregative models of social control, incurred excessively high and hard-to-justify costs.

Despite those factors, there was strong opposition to deinstitutionalization. In certain environments there was panic at the possibility of former internees from psychiatric hospitals being present in public places. In the United States there was opposition from trade unions because of the risk of unemployment and intensive lobbying by professional associations professing concern for standards.

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Furthermore, the effects of deinstitutionalization, which were reviewed in the 1980s, raised serious concerns. The overwhelming argument against suppression of the psychiatric institution was that deinstitutionalized persons were even more unhappy, ill-treated, and stigmatized than they had been in the institutional setting. Predictably, the defenders of deinstitutionalization readily responded that the deficiency lay in the fact that the community had not been given the means to receive and accommodate the mentally ill in its midst.

Forms of deinstitutionalization

In Europe, particularly in Italy and the United Kingdom, the forms taken by deinstitutionalization have been numerous and diverse, such as alternating periods in the institution and in the community, host programs in the institutions, and the creation of work cooperatives. Thus, the struggle against institutionalization has not necessarily been one of radical opposition—everything institutional or everything community-based. These efforts, in their various forms, may have permitted the extension of the deinstitutionalization movement into areas well beyond psychiatry.

Learn More in these related articles:

Sigmund Freud, 1921.
Between about 1850 and 1950 there was a steady increase in the number of patients staying in mental hospitals. In England and Wales, for example, there were just over 7,000 such patients in 1850, nearly 120,000 in 1930, and nearly 150,000 in 1954. Thereafter the number steadily declined, reaching just over 100,000 in 1970 and 75,000 in 1980, a decrease of almost 50 percent. The same process...
method of treating certain psychiatric disorders through the use of drugs or electric current to induce shock; the therapy derived from the notion (later disproved) that epileptic convulsions and schizophrenic symptoms never occurred together. In 1933 the psychiatrist Manfred Sakel of Vienna...
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