The following research paper is a synthesis of study, exploration of ideas and thoughts, from a historical, sociological, anthropological and architectural perspective, regarding mental health, mental care, the psychiatric model in those structures and the demand for de-institutionalization and community psychiatry.

This research begins with an analysis of the state of confinement and discipline in the areas of disciplinary authority, analysed from a foucauldian perspective as well as the example of discipline of Jeremy Bentham's panoply plan, focusing on the history of mental health and mental care from antiquity to the 20th century. Next, we examine the birth and spatial settlement of asylum from the 16th century where asylums make their appearance in Europe, focusing on Erving Goffman's speech on the “total institutions” and the consequences of institutionalization progressing to the decline of asylum. Furthermore, I focus on the institutionalism in Greece, more specifically the psychiatric hospitals of Corfu Dromokaitio and Leros.

Next I concentrate on the analysis of the antipsychiatric model of the 1960 and the steady stream of the civil rights movement which developed on the basis of reflection and the dominant questioning of the role of psychiatrists, the psychiatric care of the asylums and the institutional sociopolitical role of the science of dominant psychiatry. The result of these theories is the planning of reintegration into the community with intermediate out-institutional structures like mental health centers, day centers and protected apartments within the urban fabric. Finally, two model psychiatric structures (day centres) in Europe are listed as examples, with their exudative character as the main feature.