This article is based on the thesis that family care in the 20th century was practiced mainly under pragmatical/economical and therapeutical aspects. Depending on time and place, one of the two aspects would dominate while the other would serve as supporting motive. The subject of this article is to examine selected models of family care in Germany at different times as to their aim regarding the social integration of psychiatric patients. The family care patients not only lived outside the psychiatric hospitals, but were usually employed in household, farming or trade of the foster home. So the integrative potential of family care was, and still is, aimed at establishing a living and working condition as "normal" as possible. Until 1945, patients who could not or were not allowed to return to a completely independent lifestyle, family care offered them the widest range of integration and freedom. The often observed long lasting stays in families, reflect this rise in quality of life, although many were formally still associated with the mental institution. Up to the fifties, family care can be evaluated as an attempt of psychiatric hospitals to encounter the social isolation of the mentally ill. Nowadays family care is seeing a certain renaissance as part of social psychiatry. It is however not always clear whether family care can serve as a mean of real integration in the sense of a completely independent living and working condition, or whether it leads only to an, even if permanent, extramural accommodation of the chronically ill patients.
