The place of the psychiatric hospital at the present time: from the discipline to abandonment

Abstract

This paper presents a reflection about the position of the psychiatric hospitalnowadays. Starting from the experience of deconstructing a psychiatric hospital in Campina Grande,Paraíba, in 2005, it discuss that the current mental hospitals don’t really work from a disciplinarylogic, which followed during many years the development of the asylum, but from a new logic ofthe abandonment, in synchrony with the new ways of deregulation that characterize the presentpattern of sociability. The abandonment emerges as a method of controlling the segregatinginstitutions that is in agreement with the new deregulated forms of control. At last, the need fora more critical thinking about the modern forms of sociability