Deinstitutionalization and therapeutic residential services: new perspectives on psychosocial rehabilitation's field

Abstract

This article discusses the importance that construction of "living" acquires in the context of the deinstitutionalization processes of people who had lived a long course of psychiatric hospital admissions. The referable construction can be understood as a complex process that involves appropriation and resignification of ways to live the everyday life and to increase individual's contractual power, that can allow people's active participation in the material and symbolic organization of the place where they live as well as the affectionate division with others. In order to do so, this paper is anchored in the Italian deinstitutionalization process and, specially, in the contributions that the Trieste experience can bring. In Brazil, the Psychiatric Reform process has presented significant results on reduction of hospital beds and psychiatric hospitals. It has also evidenced that the construction of Mental Health services' nets involves, apart from other aspects, the search for housing alternatives to people who come from a long internment process and to those ones who have still lived in asylums. In this perspective, the implementation of residential services, which has been validated by SUS (Unified Health System), starting from the year 2000, represents a fundamental challenge to the success of Mental Health Policy. Therefore, we have been looking for contributing to the theoretical formulations of this problem and to the construction of new understandings and meanings to the psychosocial rehabilitation's processes that have been formulated and developed by mental health professionals who act in substitutive services.