The long-term management of psychiatric wounded patients with prolonged disorders requires a rethinking of our practice of care.

The aim is to propose an integrative model of all valid therapies in the post-traumatic-stress disorder while taking care of comorbidities and ensuring patient support in the different administrative procedures that permit reconstruction. Repeated short-term hospitalizations can meet this objective by mobilizing resources, creating group dynamics, restoring a space of safety, allowing a rupture with the environment, preventing recurrence of crises, and by encouraging the histicization of trauma by the temporal sequences of intra/extra-hospitalisation repetition.

We propose, by means of a review of the literature, to discuss on a psychopathological level the interest and limits of this mode of care.

This work reveals the specific therapeutic effects of repeated programmed hospitalizations, which constitute a new modality of institutional psychotherapy.

Rethinking the place of hospitalisation in the management of psychiatric illnesses can be useful to all psychiatrists who follow patients with chronic and co-morbid disease.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.