The meticulous reconstruction, from various sources, of Antoine A.’s psychiatric itinerary between 1951, when he was interned at the psychiatric hospital of Le Vinatier (Lyon), and his death in 2013 in a medico-social structure located in a small village in the Hautes-Alpes, aims to reexamine the public policies of psychiatric dishospitalisation, implemented in France from the 1970s onwards as part of the so-called “politique de secteur”. Using an individual itinerary that makes it possible to analyse the evolution of psychiatric care on a micro scale, it appears that the desire to break with asylum-based psychiatry, which consisted in cutting patients off from their environment, often permanently, has come up against many obstacles, some of which could not be removed. Lacking sufficient autonomy and in the absence of family support, Antoine A., who always presented very active symptoms, did indeed leave the psychiatric hospital but was never able to achieve the ideal of the promoters of the “politique de secteur”: to live “in the community”.