Immediate psychological effects of deinstitutionalization

Abstract

During the last 20 years numerous studies have evaluated the effects of deinstitutionalization on the lives of people with intellectual disabilities. Recent reviews of these studies show typically long lists of various measures which all indicate the superiority of community living arrangements compared to traditional institutions (Haney, 1988; Larson and Lakin, 1991; Rotegard et al., 1985). Most people in the field today are ready to affirm the supremacy of community living compared to institutions with regard to environmental quality and development of personal independence and quality of life. An effective summary of this debate is given by Conroy and Feinstein (1990), who state:

Although it is theoretically possible to construct a community service system that produces worse results than the institutional model, it must be very hard to do so; otherwise, it would have been done by now, and someone would have documented it. (Conroy and Feinstein, 1990)