This paper aims to problematize the itinerancy as a way to operationalize care in the territory. With the creation of the Unified Health System, the notion of territory has become an organizing principle of work processes in primary health care and mental health policies. In the delicate field of coordination between these policies, itinerant practices now have a strategic importance in the deinstitutionalization of practices and construction of integral care. We take the deinstitutionalization and the integrality as conceptual operators that make the difference that Psychiatric and Health reforms want to print in the care practices. Warned that by joining in a posture of active search in the life territory of users, the itinerant practices fall in a field of tensions, which can both be called to work as a part of the State apparatus to population control, as in a strategic place for the construction of a contextualized care to users" way of life. We believe that it is possible to resist the social control mandate and build an ethics of care with itinerancy to explore the political power of the movement and transform the users' territory in a laboratory for the invention of life.
mental health; primary health care; territory; deinstitutionalization