Psychiatric rehabilitation: past myths and current realities.

Psychiatric rehabilitation treatment has a unique and complementary contribution to make to the treatment of persons with a severe psychiatric disability. However, the development of the psychiatric rehabilitation field, and the adoption of its philosophy and techniques by mental health agencies, has been hampered by past myths. Research carried out in the 1960s and 1970s has exposed these myths as a part of the past, no longer relevant to the present practice of rehabilitating persons with severe psychiatric disabilities.