This article discusses the institutionalization of processes triggered by the Brazilian psychiatric reform and the micro-political strategies related to these processes. The data supporting our discussions come from an ethnographic research conducted in the years 2010 and 2011, in the Brazilian cities of Joinville, Santa Catarina state, and Barbacena, Minas Gerais state, as well as in Turin, Trieste and Gorizia, in Italy, aiming to develop a critical analysis of the Brazilian psychiatric reform from the perspective of the so-called users of mental health services. The issues discussed here show how the experiences of the subjects in these services are marked by the definition of relational and hierarchical places, and also by complex processes of subjectivation, in which micro strategies of subjection and resistance engender. Their experiences and ways of acting in the deinstitutionalization process point to the need for construction of different ways to work with the concepts related to the subjects.
psychiatric reform; deinstitutionalization; modes of subjectivation; experience; micropolitics