The massive depopulation of state mental hospitals in the 1950s (known as "deinstitutionalization") posed special challenges to mental health consumers in need of intensive psychiatric treatment. No longer confined to long-term inpatient psychiatric wards, consumers were thrust into nursing homes, assisted living centers, and onto the streets. Psychiatric treatment was relocated to the community, and the concept of recovery took on a new meaning.

Classics in Community Psychiatry is the first volume to examine the course of the community psychiatry movement over the past fifty...