DESINSTITUTIONALIZATION OF KNOWLEDGES AND PRACTICES: FROM PSYCHIATRIC REFORM TO MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES

Abstract

This study presents a literature review which aimed at tracing the historical route of the international and national psychiatric reforms, identifying social, theoretical e institutional elementos of the international level, as well as its most remarkable actors and organizations, that influenced the brasilian psychiatric reform. Moreover, it aimed at also presenting the mental health services offered in Belo Horizonte and how the whole attention network is structured in the city. For that matter, it was identified the transition of psychiatry as the competent knowledge about madness to the advent of several critics about such psychiatry and its institutions, introducing the psychiatric reform and the process of its deinstitutionalization. In terms of Brazil, the reform had a strong political nature, given the juncture of the redemocratization process and the health reform which occurred concomitantly in the country. This study points, finally, to the need of constant actualization of the reform movement and of the anti-asylum fight, as well as the establishment of resistance devices against the neoliberal logic, always biased to individualization and to the resumption of the manicomial logic.