Abstract:The prominence of chronic disabling diseases in present‐day medical practice calls for an increase in social service work to help manage the associated psychosocial problems. The four stages of the social worker's in‐hospital treatment for these patients are: 1) encouraging the patient to discuss his problems, 2) stimulating some understanding of how he may overcome these problems, 3) putting this perception into action, and 4) integrating the gains made by the patient. Work with the patient's family is inevitably involved. This kind of planning results increasingly in enabling mental hospitals to carry out their primary purpose of active treatment for the mentally ill and freeing them from the additional responsibilities of domiciliary and hospital care for chronic disease; permitting the chronically disabled to return to their own communities among familiar people and surroundings; and sometimes even accomplishing complete resocialization with return to a full and independent life. The alternative is an isolated, meaningless, dependent institutional life. Two illustrative case histories are presen