The Madness Hotel: ethnography of a public mental health policy in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro

MAGALDI, FELIPE

Florianópolis

Congreso; 18th IUAES World Congress; 2018

Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

This paper consists in an ethnography of the ?Hotel da Loucura? [The Madness Hotel] project, which ran between 2012 and 2016 at the Center of Culture, Science and Health of the Municipal Department of Health and Civil Defense of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was a public policy carried out in the format of an ?occupation?, located on two floors of an old infirmary of the Nise da Silveira Mental Health Institute, a centennial psychiatric hospital built in the district of Engenho de Dentro, in the suburbs of the city. Its program was fundamentally defined by the offer of artistic activities such as theater, music and expression workshops, as well as open mics, exhibitions, film shows and free courses in psychiatry and psychopathology, counting on the active participation of internal and external psychiatric patients in its maintenance. From a fieldwork carried out in this context, one analyzes the main tensions between the project?s proposals and the hegemonic knowledges and practices in biomedical psychiatry, established in the articulation among psychopharmacology, the pharmaceutical industry and the State. It is argued that the coexistence of these practices does not imply a peaceful coexistence, showing, otherwise, the permanence of an assymetric relationship.