0 to take someone permanently out of an institution, such as a psychiatric hospital, where they have been living for a long time:
The article describes procedures used by a residential facility to successfully deinstitutionalize severely handicapped persons.
The act intended to divert and deinstitutionalize juveniles from the traditional juvenile justice system.
Rosenhan's experiment in 1973 accelerated the movement to reform mental institutions and to deinstitutionalize as many mental patients as possible.
