From hospital to community: Case management and the virtualization of institutions

Abstract

In almost all advanced industrial countries the spatial certainties of total institutions had been attacked. All around us we see that some important change is made from institutions towards “community” or “open programs. We can find a good example of this new openness in mental health, within what is known as the move from an Institutional Psychiatry to a Communitarian one. There has been a  notorious contraction of traditional institutional settings and a concurrent movement towards community psychiatric services in such a way that old psychiatric hospitals seem now to inefficient relics of a past age.  . While some people call this process deinstitutionalization and its subsequent treatment in the community, this text offers the notion of “virtualization” as an analytical device to grasp the kind of relationships that define this process.