How societies have understood and responded to mental illness has varied drastically across time and contexts. Before the 1970s, most European countries defined a relatively narrow set of behaviours and conditions and mental illness and the response was often that a person labelled in such a way was removed from society. Due to processes of deinstitutionalization and later the discovery and diffusion of new psychiatric medication (SSIRs), the primary place of treatment moved from institutions into the community and a larger and larger proportion of the population was defined as potentially "mentally ill". In this panel, we focus on how mental illnesses have been viewed and treated within the European context, focusing both on how and why mental health treatment moved from institutions to the community with an emphasis on recovery across European countries, as well as providing more in-depth case studies of specific European contexts. Overall, the papers show that the understanding and treatment of mental illness is a cultural and political process and the movement from institutionalisation toward community services and the focus on recovery is a major social transformation that has taken place in Europe in past decades.