Abstract
Being lead by European countries, the U. S. A, and Canada, the trend of mental health care of the world has been changing from impairment oriented to community based mental health care services.
However, the mental health care system in Japan is considered to be heavily dependent on institutional medicine. The number of psychiatric beds is very large and mean duration of the hospitalization is long in Japan.
In 1991 the United Nations enunciated Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and for the Improvement of Mental Health Care. Following this enunciation, the government of Japan tried to promote mental rehabilitation services. The Law of Psychiatric Social Workers was also es-tablished in 1998.
We reviewed the history of psychiatric rehabilitation and analyzed its present state. We con-cluded that establishing more psychiatric rehabilitation facilities and better network systems for local support are urgent.
