Rehabilitation of the sick and invalids : conception and paradigm

Abstract EN

From the point of view of the general systems theory, rehabilitation is a dynamic system of interconnected components (medical, psychological and social).

The system-forming factor for the conceptual understanding of rehabilitation is its ultimate goal (restoration of a personal status).

Thus, we understand rehabilitation as a new system of thinking (a paradigm) of the therapist and his partners in implementing rehabilitation influences and measures - psychologists, social workers, lawyers, etc., as well as the patient and his closest associates, his family, first of all.

In rehabilitation we attach considerable importance to the factor termed by K.

Dorner as "landscape", i.e.

the psychosocial environment in which the patient exists with all his physical and mental ailments and problems.

In the light of the conception of rehabilitation the new paradigm represents a transition from an organism-centered style of thinking to a developmental-populational (ecological) one.

It is evident that rehabilitation of mental patients has its own specificity, being oriented on resocialization, destigmatization and compliance of patients to a greater extent than rehabilitation in other areas of medicine.

All these significant rehabilitation factors are closely connected with the ethical, political and ideological peculiarities of this or that society.

In this connection, the solution of problems of training qualified personnel and organizing various forms of psychiatric and medico-psychological care-giving, as well as work with lawyers and journalists will allow us to overcome in due course certain negativism in the attitude towards both psychiatry (psychiatrists) as a whole, and psychiatric rehabilitation.

In conclusion it should be pointed out that the wrong accentuation and simplification of the dynamic system of rehabilitation, for instance, the reduction of its essence to any one or two factors (to psychotherapy and/or employment, for instance), can cause disappointment in its efficiency and even more distressing consequences.