Therapeutic innovation: a model for mental health planning

Enlightened and progressive care of the mentally ill is closer to reality with the creation of the psychiatric halfway house. The halfway house is not an institutional edifice but a residential facility located in the community and indistinguishable from the other neighboring dwellings. The feature which sets apart the halfway house programmatically is its provision of a housing unit with some services for ex-hospital patients. Human incarceration continues to be a major enforcement instrument for the control of deviant behavior. Mental illness, as one type of poorly understood behavior, is for the most part controlled by institutionalizing the mentally ill person in a large dehumanized total institution such as the state mental hospital. Although major reforms are underway in many total institutions to humanize treatment procedures, innovative alternatives to custodial care are gaining impetus in the community. One such fascinating and rapidly expanding treatment innovation is the psychiatric halfway house. This presentation represents the results and implications of a comparative study of twenty such programs in the United States.