ABSTRACT
During the 1970s, an entire generation of psychiatrists and psychologists in the Western world rebelled against the internment of patients into lunatic asylums and other forms of physical and pharmacological restraint. Social community psychiatry and family therapy were born and developed from the failure of a model of intervention based on social exclusion and marginalization of mentally ill patients. It has taken a long time to heal the relationship between normality and pathology, and to allow the human resources inside the illness to emerge. It has taken just as long to discover and concretely demonstrate that the cure is not only to be found inside the patient, but also within the family, in the social context and in human solidarity.
