[P.R.E.A. (Rehabilitation and Assisted Outpatient Care Program): an alternate experience to the "Asylum Logic"]

The purpose of the following article is show the work that has been going on for the past nine years in the Assisted Discharge and Rehabilitation Program (PREA, from its Spanish initials), at the Esteves Hospital, Temperley, Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Our aim is to describe the historical and political context that gave rise to this program as well as the different activities carried out through its mechanisms to achieve the program's main objective: institutional discharge and resocialization of long-term patients with high chronicity in the psychiatric facility. This is the account of an experiment which, together with other similar ones already carried out in our country and elsewhere in the world, proves clearly that there are practical and sustainable alternatives to institutionalization and confinement for the treatment of serious mental disorders and chronicity; and that this is feasible within our province's current situation and our public health system.