Introduction: towards deinstitutionalization

Abstract

Deinstitutionalization has been perhaps the most important development in the way services for people with intellectual disabilities have been organized in Western Europe and North America over the last 25 years. The book Changing patterns in Residential Services for the Mentally Retarded (Kugel and Wolfensberger, 1969) represented a turning point in thinking about services, summarizing the shift from traditional forms of institutional care of the 1950s and 1960s to new models based on the community, and elaborating new objectives and ideals for the change towards community services.