Psychosocial rehabilitation: issues and answers for psychiatry

The American Association of Community Psychiatrists has composed a set of principles to guide psychiatry's relationship with psychosocial rehabilitation. They consist of five basic precepts offering the profession an orientation to rehabilitation, accompanied by seven issues that discuss aspects of how psychiatry must finally adopt psychosocial rehabilitation as a model of practice with people who have severe psychiatric disorders. The authors advance the argument that a confluence of developments, both within and beyond psychiatry, has now created an opportunity for psychiatry to build a mutually productive relationship with rehabilitation.