ABSTRACT
This chapter presents case studies of three communities that deal with extreme forms of transition. Each of these communities includes people coming from one of our society's most repressive institutions — the mental hospital. The concept "mental illness" implies that the experience of such people is crazy and that it has to be straightened out to conform to that of other people. Nearly every resident feels that the House is helpful to him, and of the approximately seventy discharged patients who lived there during its first two years, only about ten have had to return to hospitals for short stays, and only five are currently in hospitals. The chapter conveys an idea of what it is like to live in the House and how the community differs from many conventional hospital and aftercare commuties. The House is described by the ten former hospital patients who lived there in March, 1968, as related in taped interviews.
