Training in mental health with multidisciplinary residencies: context of psychiatric counter-reform and defense of psychosocial care

Abstract

In this theoretical essay on the about the dismantling of the national mental health policy between 2016 and 2022, we aim to discuss training in mental health with multidisciplinary residencies in this context of psychiatric counter-reform. We address the changes in the National Mental Health Policy, the analysis of the Multiprofessional Residency Programs in Health since their proponents, the impasses in Mental Health training, and the defense of the psychosocial paradigm in mental health training. We problematize that this period meant a serious setback of the National Mental Health Policy, impacting the continuity and strengthening of mental health training strategies in dialogue with the anti-asylum struggle, producing tensions with psychosocial care, which guides training in the Brazilian National Health System. We analyze that politics and training in mental health involve corporatist and market interests in constant dispute with the psychosocial paradigm, inserting themselves in a dialectical process in the struggle for hegemony. We conclude that looking at it from this point of view makes it possible to understand the strategic role of training in mental health in the implementation of the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform, with deinstitutionalization as its guideline in the perspective of deconstruction of how society deals with madness and diversity.