The term "psychiatric reform" is, in terms of the dichotomy of diametrically opposed meanings and contents it expresses, one of the most controversial. Has there ever been any real reform of the mental health services system, its culture, and practice, or was the result of about 30 years of co-funded programs merely a neo-institutional structure that reproduced the function of the traditional psychiatric circuit unchanged?
Today, what the interaction was between an externally imposed "reform," initiated by the "Leros issue," and the goals, visions, and practices of those seeking paths "beyond and outside" the dominant psychiatric paradigm, seems to young mental health professionals, as well as to those directly affected by psychiatric experiences, and to society as a whole, to be beyond their capabilities to see, touch, or "build upon" this experience – the quests, the difficulties, the unattainable goals of it – as material for reflection on the form and content of an emancipatory practice in the field of mental health, in the present and the coming future.
Describing the experience of his exile as an irrevocable expulsion as far away as possible, without any return, a patient in Leros once said: "Dafni, Leros, Turkey." Something similar could symbolize the journey from Dromokaiteio, which is one of the main pillars of institutional psychiatry, to Leros, where for a moment a ray of light marked that an "other," alternative psychiatry is possible, and from there to Dafni, the other pillar of institutional psychiatry, which grounds us in a reality where nothing had fundamentally changed, perhaps except for the external image of institutional repression.
