Social exclusion of the mentally ill - A critical review and outlook of community psychiatry at the beginning of the 21st century

The social implications and disabilities of long-term mental disorders have been well described and are known for a long time. The classical paradigm of social psychiatry postulating that deshospitalization automatically generates social integration has proven to be wrong. Along that line the view that living in the community supported by different services aiming at integration has also failed to be successful. Without explicitly labelling it: community-based psychiatry has yielded a psychiatry-based community. It never served the majority of the non-chronically mentally ill with disordered social skills who also need specific support or are as well bound for unemployment and social disadvantages. Without doubt, the progress made by community psychiatry in the past was eminently linked to the ideology and implementation of deinstitutionalization. Defining and dealing with social exclusion means a turning point for social and community psychiatry - a new paradigm that could generate a different view upon therapeutical outcomes and the way that therapy and rehabilitation have to be organised and implemented. Especially the example of vocational rehabilitation could mark a stepping stone by initiating further investigations and progress for new approaches in community support. Supported employment programmes have shown the superiority of "place and train" instead of first train in institutions or services and then place on the spot. Thus a so-called inclusion therapy could arise that takes place "in vivo et actu" and near to the individual's real world of tasks and demands. Progress in any part of multidimensional therapy is legitimized only by empirical validation of functional outcome and social inclusion measures. Such an evaluation of complex programmes taking social inclusion into account is sophisticated but seems to be necessary in the field of general psychiatric therapies as well as for the legitimation of financial resources needed. Foreseeing the perspective of social psychiatry a next substantial step could be the identification of social and functional outcome variables.