[Social reintegration: a dynamic program to help psychiatric patients acquire functional and interpersonal skills]

Since new mental health policies have been developed, government and community-based organizations appear to be working closer toward facilitating the social reintegration process regarding persons experiencing psychiatric problems. This article describes a project which fosters the development of a patient's functional and interpersonal skills in a para-hospital environment: supervised apartments. The program's objective is to encourage awareness of an individual's situation and especially to allow him or her to acquire and experiment a certain number of skills for the ultimate purpose of reintegrating the community. This project is carried out by the psychiatry department of Notre-Dame Hospital in collaboration with the Maison l'Echelon Inc., a non-profit organization that manages a group of supervised apartments for psychiatric patients.