The term psychosocial rehabilitation refers to equipping people with social, vocational, educational and interpersonal skills in order to have the ability to choose their own future.
The growing recognition that a large proportion of persons having schizophrenia and mood disorders experience long term disability with persisting symptoms or a relapsing course of illness episodes has given birth to the field of psychiatric rehabilitation. A chronic mental illness is an illness where the illness has got a long prognosis course. The incidence rate of severe mental disorder in the world is 35 people out of 1 lac, which needs rehabilitation. Out of this 80 % of the problems can be dealt with effectively. So psychiatric rehabilitation is a process, which helps the individual to find an alternative for hospitalization.
Psychiatric rehabilitation emphasizes continues and indefinite treatment of life long disorders for the maintenance of symptoms control, prevention or reduction of relapses and optimization of performance by the chronically ill patients in social, vocational educational and familiar roles with least amount of support necessary for the helping professions. Rehabilitation is a helping process wherein the client is motivated, facilitated and encouraged to develop his lost skills and develop on his residual skills so as to become functional member of the society.
Rehabilitation plan is different for each individual for each individual depending on his type of illness, duration, socio-cultural factors, severity, family background etc. ‘Team work is one of the very important factors in the process of rehabilitation. Team cooperation and coordination is very essential for the success of the rehabilitation programme.