Mental health outside the sanatorium is the subject of Caminhos da Reportagem

Anyone who sees Patricia Roth calmly paint her pictures can hardly imagine the horrors she actually suffered. Imprisoned in reformatories and asylums since childhood, she was subjected to corporal punishment, restraints, and even electric shocks. For decades of isolation in psychiatric hospitals, she has lost her family ties and even her identity.

progress The fight against asylum In the country are the subject of the program Reporting trackswhich airs on Sundays (21), at 10 p.m., on Brazil TV. He accompanies psychiatric patients who have been through long-term hospitalizations and who have returned to life outside the walls of institutions.

With the onset of the struggle against asylum in Brazil, paths like Patricia’s have taken, little by little, new directions. She, who was one of the patients at the former Colônia Juliano Moreira Hospital, the last closed asylum in Rio de Janeiro, is now a recognized visual artist. “It has changed a lot for me. Something I never had and never expected, my home. These works that I am doing today are my gold because I sell and exhibit abroad, ”celebrates Patricia.

The civil society movement, which began in the late 1970s, criticizes traditional psychiatric methods and advocates for the rights of people in psychological distress. “The fight against asylums is a fight for citizenship, a fight for recognizing people who are fragile, overcoming the idea that there are less worthy people. So, everything comes into play: racism, homophobia, any form of discrimination,” she says. says Hugo Fagundes, a superintendent of mental health in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

With the approval of the Psychiatric Reform Law in 2001, there has been a programmed reduction of the psychiatric family in Brazil. According to the non-governmental organization (NGO) Desinstitute, the number of long-term hospitalized patients has fallen from 50,000 in 2002 to less than 14,000 in 2020. Avoiding relapses remains a challenge for asylum advocates, according to the president of the Brazilian Association of Mental Health, Ana Paula Gulgore. .

Sanatorium closures are not synonymous with a lack of care for patients and their families. Care freely, keeping the patient integrated in his home region, his social circle, is most effective, Guljor guarantees.

Among the support mechanisms for patients, in addition to the Psychosocial Aid Centers (CAPs) that are part of the Unified Health System (SUS), there are therapeutic housing, which is a kind of republic – with a maximum of six people – offered to university graduates. Psychiatric hospitals that still need some support to return to community life. a team Reporting tracks Went to see the routine of one of these houses.

“There are a thousand other ways to take care, to cure the madness, the subject of mental suffering,” says Erica Pontes y Silva, Director of the Health Aid Institute of the Municipality of Nice da Silveira. Workshops and art activities in community gardens are examples of therapies approved in former remodeled psychiatric institutions.

The program shows how places of confinement and suffering in the past have become places of art and therapy with affection and freedom, such as the Bispo do Rosario Museum and the Nise da Silveira Institute, both in Rio de Janeiro.

data sheet

Production and reporting: Clarice Basso
Film coverage: Gabriel Benchel, Gelson Machado, Marcelo Padovan, Ronaldo Parra, Sandro Tebaldi
Technical assistance: Adaroan Barros, Caio Araujo, and Yuri Freire
Production Support: Luiz Felipe Salvador – Intern
Screenplay: Ana Bassos and Clarice Basso
Text editing: Anna Bassos
Photo editing and finishing: Eric Gusmao
Art: Julia Gunn and Marco Bravo
EBC Research Group: Alain Britas, Eric Pinheiro, Fabio Araujo Jorge, Fernanda Buarque, Mariana Nazareth, Pedro Modesto and Thiago Guimarães

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