Authoritarianism, democracy and psychiatric reform in Argentina, 1943-83

From 1955 through the early 1970s a group pf Argentine psychiatrists, influenced by psychoanalysis and the mental health movement, and supported by military and civilian governments alike, began attempts to transform psychiatric care by replacing large asylums with day hospitals, general hospital clinics and therapeutic communities. Their goals included integrating psychiatry into the mainstream of medicine, improving medical and social services to patients, improving the relationship between doctors and patients, and eliminating patients' social isolation. The military coup of march 1976 ushered in a period of unchecked repression and led to the evaporation of what had often been a tenuous alliance between progressive psychiatry and the state.