Nós, comedores de sabão: a frágil racionalidade da clausura

Abstract

This article discusses impasses in the process of deinstitutionalizing madness, based on the results of a census conducted in Private Therapeutic Residences in a municipality in southern Brazil. These residences, viewed as contemporary asylums that still exist contrary to the law and current mental health policies in the country, reflect on the fate of lives subjected to asylum practices in such establishments, ones considered unworthy of mourning. What has been identified is that the intensification of the asylum logic results from counter-reformist forces updated within the context of Brazilian psychiatric reform. This conservative movement is particularly observed in segregating practices in mental health related to the care of people who use alcohol and other drugs. The resulting reflection calls for the need to build strategies to reinvent the anti-asylum struggle in light of our current challenges, which reaffirms greater attention with respect to freedom as a non-negotiable premise.

Keywords

• Brazil
• deinstitutionalization of mental health
• madness
• mental health policy
• psychiatric hospitals