This study aimed to analyze the social representation of aging in institutionalized psychiatric patients to health professionals. This is a qualitative study was developed with the contribution of the structural approach of social representations theory, held on two macro-hospitals located in Rio de Janeiro, attended by 50 health professionals. We performed data collection using the technique of evocation and analysis with free software Ensemble de Programmes Permettant L'analyse des Évocations (EVOC). 250 words evoked in response to the inductive term aging, Psychiatric / Mental Health, grouped into three dimensions, namely, affective / emotional, exclusion and abandonment and care / institutional. The group explained, in the midst of its representation, that the phenomenon of aging patients with mental illness in an institutional environment is closed and reclusive reconstituted as pervaded by a distinctively negative affectivity, possibly as a consequence of other dimensions in the core of representation, especially exclusion and family abandonment, social, and public institution.
Aging; Long-Term Care; Mental Health; Psychiatric Nursing
