Asylum logic. An analysis of the imaginary that recalls the madness in the health workers of a general hospital

Abstract

This work aims to realize a reading of the practice of internment of mental health in a general hospital of Rosario’s city between 2010 and 2013. At that moment, the internments that concerned subjective crises (though they were relying on precedents and institutionalized circuits), were acquiring a new legal frame due to the sanction of the national mental health law which stated that general hospitals were an alternative institution to psychiatric hospitals. The main objective of this work is to enable a more complex analysis of certain aspects that emerge in these practices. We mainly focus in the imaginary that the madness recall in the workers of the health. The hypothesis consists in the idea that the hospital can be a scene in which the asylum logic is updated, interferring the accomplishment of the new ways of mental suffering treatment proposed by the law. The approach to the problems was made through a bibliographical analysis of the demanicomialization processes carried out in different countries, as well as the experience of the Santa Fe Local Territory during the last years. I worked at the hospital as a resident of the Specialization Course and this allowed me to formulate several questions related to the way in which the internments for subjective crises were carried out there, and I could make several interviews to key informants (psychologist, nurses, doctor) of the Local Public Institution Management. Among the collected information, it is emphazised that the patient with psychic suffering presents major complications at the moment of receiving assistance in the general hospital, due to the persisting idea of being a special pacient for special institution (asylum). These difficulties are associated to the imaginary of madness which is still present in the workers and which, as a consequence, carries a dismissal of the other one as a similar one. This permanent difficulty hampers to include the problems of mental health in the general hospitals. It’s outlined the need to deal strategically whith this problem in order to advance in the fulfillment of the legislation in force, bearing in mind the complexity of these practices. They will not be solved through a process of beaucratisation