This article discusses a teaching strategy developed as a trigger for the theme of total institutions and psychiatric hospitals as devices for segregating and degrading the identity of inpatients. Based on an ethnographic record and political and paradigmatic shifts in mental health care, we created a chronicle highlighting the main concepts of Erving Goffman’s symbolic interactionism. This text invites readers to traverse the various layers that drive the institution’s cogs and wheels and produce the moral career of the mentally ill and staff who work there. Processes in which the mortification and profanation of the Self are shrouded by an official knowledge that controls, punishes and reacts to anything that threatens the asylum apparatus with destabilization.
Keywords
Total institution; Asylum; Narratives; Erving Goffman