The analysis of the public and private uses of institutional mental health care has already shown that psychiatric institutions were not isolated from society: patients and their private and public milieus intervened in different ways and to different degrees in psychiatric hospitalisation, shaping its purposes and determining its beginning and end. This chapter looks in more detail at the relationship between institutions and their social environment by exploring the duration of illness before admission, previous treatments, the length of hospitalisation and, finally, the ways in which institutions were communicating with the outside world.