Institutional violence and mental illness: narratives on people who left a Brazilian psychiatric hospital

Abstract

Under the perspective of the Psychiatric Reform, the goal of this article is presenting reports of institutional violence in long-term psychiatric hospitalizations, based on the life itineraries of people in the process of deinstitutionalization in a large municipality in the state of Bahia, Brazil. We carried out participating observation including nine beneficiaries of the “De Volta para Casa” (“Back Home”) program, who leaved the hospital thirteen years ago; and three semi-structured interviews with workers who assisted them. The researchers’ field diaries and the interviews transcripts were transformed into narratives, which were analyzed qualitatively, in order to identify violence suffered before admission or during hospitalization. Reasons for hospitalization differed by gender: men were hospitalized for crimes against people; women, for “breaking seclusion”, love frustrations, physical and sexual violence. Contents about the administered daily life, and exposure to institutional violence (absence of socio-therapeutic activities, medication in punitive doses with sedative effect, neglect concerning physical health, physical aggression, confinement, "injection", "electric shock", prejudice, stigma), emerged from the reports about the hospitalization period. showing the subjects had their possibilities of reacting against domination neutralized. The results provided reflection on State violence, crucial in the current context of deconstruction of the Brazilian Mental Health Policy.