Psychiatry reform in reports of therapeutic residence care providers

Abstract

The Brazilian Psychiatry Reform has created a number of alternatives to substitute the asylum internment system, among them, the Therapeutic Residential Service (SRT). Aiming at deepening the reflections over the challenges the reformist proposal faces, this study analyzes the discourses constructed by care providers of therapeutic residences in Campina Grande (state of Paraíba), to identify argumentative strategies either in favor or against the Reform, identify the identities they build for themselves and for other mental health network professionals and for the service users, in addition to analyzing how they name and describe psychic suffering. The research has a qualitative character, based on the theoreticalmethodological perspective of discursive social psychology. A total of 18 oral reports were obtained and submitted to discourse analysis. Although the care providers revealed their approval of the psychiatric reform, their reports stress the need for psychiatric hospitals, mainly for those users undergoing crises. Besides, hospital professionals are seen, in some of those reports, as more capable than those in the substitutive network. Moreover, these reports associate psychiatric suffering to disease, to dangerousness, and to alienation and characterize the users as aggressive, dangerous, and unstable. On the whole, those interviewed justify some practices typical of hospitals, value medical knowledge and reproduce asylum discourses.