| Summary: | Psychiatric care was reformed in Spain well into the 1980s, later than the rest of the countries in its milieu. In practice, it meant the closure and restructuring of the obsolete insane asylums and hospices, on the one hand in order to consider mental health as one aspect of an overall concept of health, and, on the other, to permit the assimilation into society of many of the individuals who had previously been committed to psychiatric hospitals owing to their illness. This reform, the objective of which was the closure of insane asylums, as they were known generally in society, gave rise to a profound transformation in the life of the patients who had been institutionalized for many years and were now obliged to adapt to new ways of living with others. The Norwegian film Elling deals with this process in the case of its two protagonists, who leave a psychiatric institution to move to a house in the city centre and try to live more autonomously with the help of minimal supervision.
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