Nidotherapy (the ‘i’ is long) is a treatment born of despair and desperation. It has been used to date mainly for a group of people with chronic mental illness who have been in the long-term care of psychiatric services in the UK. In describing this population it is necessary to put it into context. Before 1970 mental healthcare was generally split into two groups: a large group of patients in mental hospitals (asylums; it reached a maximum of 150 000 in 1964) who had major mental illness (psychoses, dementias and learning (intellectual) disability), many of whom stayed for many years, and another, larger group who were often characterised unfairly as the ‘worried well’ – as they were neither particularly worried nor particularly well – who lived in the community and were not generally stigmatised as being mentally ill, possibly because the full nature of their troubles was rarely admitted overtly. Most active psychiatric care was given to the second group, many of whom were classified as having either depression or neurotic or stress-related problems, and as much was given in public (National Health Service) as in private care. Of course treatment for the other group was also given, and there was some crossover between the two, but the treatment for the more severe psychoses was mainly pharmacological and given for those in psychiatric hospitals. Most of the new drug treatments had been introduced between 1950 and 1970 and for a time they were regarded with such high hopes that other treatments were lost in their shade (Sargant, 1966). Gradually, from about 1972 onwards, but only partly as a result of this new therapeutic optimism, the deinstitutionalisation of the mental hospital began, and those in the first hospital group (I will call it thus for short) were returned to the community in one form or another. Large institutions were regarded as bad and counter-therapeutic, and good community services, with a small institutional base linked to a clear geographical catchment area (Thornicroft & Tansella, 2004) were the new form of care for these patients. Oddly enough, the optimism behind this was so great that before long the term ‘recovery’ replaced ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘long-term care’ (see chapter 8) and the notion that no one with a mental illness should be regarded as immune from recovery became almost a politically correct mantra.