Study of a residential service: reflection about the processes of deinstitutionalization

Abstract

The residential services appear as initiative of the deinstitutionalization processes and they constitute a fundamental instrument for the Politics of Mental Health that assume the goal of overcoming the psychiatric hospitals and of the internments of long duration. This work is part of the dissertation, accomplished in the period from 2003 February to 2005 July, in the Program of Masters degree in Nursing of the University of São Paulo. The general objective of this study was to know the residential services of the municipal district of Santo André and to understand the characteristics and reach of the deinstitutionalization project in course. For so much, it was looked for to identify and to analyze: the conceptions on residential service in the actors' vision that they live and they build your day by day; the structural characteristics and organizational of a residential service and the daily of your residents. The research is configured as qualitative and it was built starting from diversified procedures: study of case and participant observation, interviews and documental analysis, besides the bibliographical study on the problematization themes. The data were analyzed to the light of the authors' of the Italian deinstitutionalization theoretical perspective. Being been worth of the emergent themes three axes was elaborated for the analysis, among them the object of attention of this article: the structural characteristics and organizational of the residential service. The analysis of the data revealed: a) the possibilities and progresses propitiated by the responsible Social Organization by the administration of the residential service; b) the need of the residential service to be organized in a flexible way, that favor the increase of the autonomy and the residents' protagonism and c) the significant contribution of the experience in the creation of a new life space and care for the people with severe and persistent mental disorders that lived long institutionalization processes.