Psiquiatria e ficção: ensaios críticos

Abstract

This dissertation articulates two objects, psychiatry and fiction, aiming to produce regions of indeterminacy and estrangement regarding the contemporary. It is through this geography of time — paying attention to the gray areas of history, with our backs turned to the future, and against the rules of monumental contracts — that we embark on essayistic adventures. There are two main paths of thought here. In the first section, we problematize the radically psychiatrized society currently found in Brazil; and we investigate the emergence of psychiatry in 19th-century France amidst the Enlightenment contradictions of the time — namely, the political and administrative difficulties in legitimizing the confinement and tutelage of the insane — in order to propose alternative strategies for a radical critique of the psychiatric medicalization (fictionalization) operation. Instead of unmasking the fiction of psychiatry in a denunciatory and moral tone, we aim to understand its means of producing meaning, so as to map, interrupt, and dismantle its political-fictional monument in the present. After all, Robert Castel reminds us that psychiatry is nothing more than a political science. In the second section, we use fiction to scientifically root around the provenances of our current catastrophe: the overwhelming setbacks of the Brazilian psychiatric reform and the brutal psychiatrization of our social fabric. Thus, we establish relations of proximity between two houses. On one side, the Casa Verde (Green House), a fictional formulation by Machado de Assis representing the asylum technological apparatus that marks the constitution of psychiatry in Brazil, linked to a European — mainly French — paradigm. On the other side, the White House, the imperialist headquarters and condenser of psychiatric mutations in the West after World War II, which uses community and preventive psychiatry as a paradigmatic model for global export and colonization. Amidst these borders, inspired by Franca Ongaro Basaglia and Franco Basaglia, Trieste (the host city of the inventive experience of the Italian psychiatric reform) is bracketed. The goal is to open up a new indeterminacy to be collectively experienced by the Brazilian movements fighting against asylums and psychiatry. These and other possible technologies for visualizing and narrating phenomena ultimately lead us to displace the concept of deinstitutionalization: it is not enough to deinstitutionalize the asylum, madness, or other artifacts that sustain psychiatry and make it operate in society; it is necessary, in fact, to deinstitutionalize psychiatry, the institution itself. This implies promoting its abolition in society, in articulation with penal abolitionism.