The Return Home Program and its daily repercussions: access to income and the intersections of existential territories in community life

Abstract

This article analyzes the repercussions of the Return Home Program – a Brazilian cash transfer program – on the lives of people discharged from psychiatric hospitals. Our aim was to ascertain the program’s repercussions on the lives of its beneficiaries, particularly with respect to the implications of accessing an income for their everyday life, in addition to highlighting some of the intersections between their life contexts and existential territories: sexuality, gender, aging, and forms of urban violence. An evaluative study was carried out between 2017 and 2018 that focused on the life itineraries of 20 people. Consequently, we were able to observe that access to income was a fundamental aspect of the experience of living outside the hospital, with regards to the exercise of material exchanges and forays into the community. We discuss the challenges of guaranteeing assisted support to beneficiaries on a contractual basis and the evaluation of psychosocial rehabilitation processes, linked to the intersections that mark ways of living.

Keywords

• deinstitucionalization
• income
• personal narrative
• brazil