Challenges in de-institutionalization process in mental health community services

Abstract

After the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform (BPR) and the implementation of community-based health facilities replacing the asylum model, new practices of care to mental health users were built. This work inquires the challenges faced by BPR regarding the deistutitionalization in the community-based health facilities. The research was developed at a Psychosocial Care Center (CAPS) in a municipality at Porto Alegre Metropolitan Region. It used the intervention-research approach as a methodological strategy, betting in the idea that knowledge production and practices can walk together. Workshops with a group of long-term CAPS's users, who spent most of their daytime at the health facility, were done. The goal was to map some of the user's preferred routes in the city and then follow these routes with them. The results achieved by this intervention put in analysis the relations with the city, the user's economic vulnerability, and unfolded into the researcher herself.