The importance of living and housing conditions of patients in a psychiatric hospital is emphasized. Sociotherapy is defined as the process of methodical intervention, in the interest of the patient, in the interaction of circumstances of life and treatment. A distinction is made between manipulation of the circumstances of life in the hospital aimed at

• improvement of the function of the hospita] as a hotel,
• the support of the treatment in a narrower sense, and
• making the patients utilize all the possibilities the hospital has to offer them.

The applicability of the first and second method is restricted to selected groups of short-stay patients. The Jatter, an antropological/pedagogical method of sociotherapy, has been developed in the psychiatric hospital 'Wolfheze', and can be adapted to the wide variety of living and treatment situations, needed in a hospital admitting all types of patients.