The trend toward neo-institutionalization and religious discourse: elements of analysis for psychiatric reform

Abstract

Based on the experience of Italian democratic psychiatry, deinstitutionalization became the main axis of the Brazilian psychiatric reform policies. However, the tendency to isolate mental health users persists, leading to recurrent hospitalizations or neo-institutionalization. In the absence of the old asylums, new circuits for the confinement of madness have been created, with therapeutic communities as a paradigmatic example. Considering that the institution is the set of sayings, practices, and moralities that objectify users, translating the dominant rationality, it is necessary to show the ideology of the new asylum strongholds to understand the function they are fulfilling in today’s society. Therefore, this study seeks to analyze, by a narrative bibliographical review, what these institutions represent, how they operate, and what questions they pose to the psychosocial care network — especially CAPS. Discussing the case of Centro Vita and the therapeutic communities, which express a similar logic, show that if, on the one hand, they are places destined for the death of unproductive people, on the other hand, they embody moralities and mentalities crossed by religious discourse, responding to subjective and existential needs that must urgently be addressed in view of the growing social disaffiliation that plagues mental health users and their families.