Abstract
In psychiatric reforms, breaking away from the asylum is not only a legal issue, but also a cultural one. Basaglia warned of the “control circuit” in society that defines normal and pathological behaviors, punishing and excluding those who cannot be domesticated or neutralized. In this article, we used empirical data to propose the concept of asylum care circuit, developing its own institutionalization configuration by articulating processes of pathologization, psychopharmaceuticalization, and stigma. This ensemble of processes guarantees a cultural basis to the mechanisms for the asylum’s perpetuation, since it produces asylum sociabilities and sensibilities. The asylum care circuit operates in the open, with a set of discourses, practices, and technologies, which work interdependently with the asylum, with special participation of the family, an institution that tends to manipulate psychiatric drugs in the manner of moral technologies. We identified three integral moments that integrate this circuit of care, by Ricoeur-based hermeneutic analysis of two cases we selected from an ethnographic research on trajectories of (de)institutionalization of people suffering psychological distress: a) the bolstering process of pathological identities, b) the control spiral: psychotropic drugs retro-feeding pathologizing stigma, and c) the out-of-the-asylum domestication of the asylum-solution. With this analysis, we seek to fill one of the gaps observed in studies that examine how the contexts of psychiatric reform have insufficiently dealt with understanding how social and cultural dynamics impose challenges to the work of deinstitutionalization.
Keywords:
Mental Health; Deinstitutionalization; Stigma; Medicalization; Psychotropic Drugs