Abstract

FERRO, Luís Felipe. Territorial Work in psychiatric hospitals: building a future without hospices by working in the present. Psicol. cienc. prof. [online]. 2009, vol.29, n.4, pp. 752-767. ISSN 1414-9893.

Assuming the Brazilian psychiatric reform as a background, this article aims to situate and differentiate two essential concepts in order to transpose the old model of mental health attention, centered in the psychiatric hospitals: dehospitalization and “desinstitutionalization”. Exploring these concepts, the need of “desinstitutionalization” of the attention in mental health is underlined, emphasizing the necessary changes in the therapeutic practices as well as in hospitalization. In the pragmatic field, the article tries to re-set the role and the work of health professionals bound to psychiatric hospitals, arguing about the possibilities of desinstitutionalization of the therapeutic practices by proposing a community-based work. The organization and the practical application of this work focuses the creation or fortification of a solid net of community services that would subsidize the needful changes in the mental health paradigm and in the strengthening of substitute services. It might rescue the debit of social exclusion made by mental health, investing in social inclusion and in the citizenship of the individuals with mental disorders. The psychiatric hospitals, still needed for the mental health attention, considering the actual panorama of composition and constitution of the substitute services, becomes here the catalyzer of its own reform.

Keywords : Psychosocial rehabilitation; Psychiatric hospitals; Mental health; Psychiatric reform.

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