“Review: Ablard, Jonathan (2008) Madness in Buenos Aires: Patients, Psychiatrists and the Argentine State, 1880-1983, University of Calgary Press (Calgary), ix  319 pp. $34.95”

VISACOVSKY, SERGIO EDUARDO

BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH

Blackwell Publishing

Año: 2011 vol. 30 p. 264 - 265

0261-3050

In the compelling Madness in Buenos Aires, Jonathan Ablard is interested in madness as a window to understand strategic issues about Argentina, such as the structure of the state, social change and the restrictions of modernization. Ablard affirms that a stable trait of the state throughout the history has been its weakness to provide social services to population. Ablard shows that in 1880-1983 psychiatric attention was characterized by serious overcrowding and appalling living conditions of patients in mental hospitals; lack of suitable staff and resources; and low rates of confinement compared to similar periods in Western Europe and United States. The Argentine state has always had severe inconveniences to administrate and fund public mental hospital system; and given that confined patients suffered the consequences of abandonment and oversight, the situation could be defined as chaotic. Ablard concludes that social control of insane population has been a real goal of the Argentine state but it could not carry out that function. In other words, it is difficult to think about an inefficient state as an all powerful machine of social domination. Ablard shows that psychiatrists required from the state a much firmer intervention to improve living conditions of patients, control immigration and deviant behaviours of population which were dangerous for the modernization of the nation. These structural restrictions of the state have been underestimated by other scholars, who have interpreted overcrowding and dreadful living conditions of patients as a consequence of the specific way of social control and power of psychiatric institutions. On the contrary, Ablard asserts that it is impossible to understand demands of psychiatrists to the state, experiences of patients and their families, and professionals and lay ideas about mental illness unless we consider the difficulties of the state, as a result of political and economic instability and political polarization during the twentieth century.