The main historical stages of the social rehabilitation of the mentally-ill patients show that the psychiatric hospital centred approach has been progressively cast off and therefore the creation of intermediate institutions and ambulatory care integrated in the city has been favoured. This has allowed the progressive development of the psychosocial rehabilitation. This reorientation of the medical practice towards the community was based on two specific and corollary approaches: the deinstitutionalisation and the rehabilitation, which have the common objective to facilitate the return of the patient in the natural social community. The psychosocial rehabilitation includes the deinstitutionalisation and the return to the community, in a holistic approach aiming at compensating for the psychosocial handicap induced by the mental illness. The concept of the psychosocial rehabilitation itself has been progressively elaborated over time. The initial enthusiasm was followed by a period of progressive disillusion, which was finally followed by the development of the psychosocial rehabilitation as a true specific clinical discipline, a topic in medical education and in scientific research