ABSTRACT
The period in the mental hospital is a difficult one for the patient to assimilate to the medical model. In Western society, an important way in which two individuals may deal with each other is as server and served. This chapter explores the assumptions and ideals behind this occupational relationship, one can understand some of the problems of mental hospitalization. The Western history of the interpretation of persons who seem to act oddly is a dramatic one. In the West there are differences in stress between practitioners with an "organic" approach and those with a "functional" one, but the assumptions underlying both approaches similarly support the legitimacy of applying the medical version of the service model to asylum inmates. In a medical hospital, one's own physical incapacities are taken as a sign that treatment, however unpleasant or confining, is needed for one's own good and should be accepted.
