ABSTRACT
Until the last part of the twentieth century, the focus of services for people with mental illness was in a number of large mental hospitals or ‘asylums’, which were usually built outside towns and cities and sometimes had more than a thousand in-patients. Such large hospitals for the treatment of mental illness still exist in some parts of the world, but in many countries mental health care has undergone a revolution during the last 30 years with the closure of such large institutions and the development of ‘care in the community’.
