The return of the central importance of the psychiatric hospital: recent retrocession in the mental health policy

Abstract

The goal of the present study was to understand the experience of the coexistence between the substitutive services and the psychiatric hospital. This is a study with a qualitative hermeneutic approach. The research was carried out in the Northeast of Brazil. It contemplated two scenarios: Center of Psychosocial Attention, and Psychiatric Hospital. It included 14 participants, 8 of whom were workers of the Center of Psychosocial Attention and 6 who were health workers at the Psychiatric Hospital. To obtain the information, an in-depth interview and a systematic observation were performed. The collection took place from August to October 2017. The analysis of the interviews was performed using the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, through the following steps: speech to text transcription, exhaustive reading, structural analysis, wide-ranging comprehension of the text, interpretation and analysis. The results showed that there is a paradoxical coexistence between the psychosocial care services and the psychiatric hospital, even though the hospital service is not recognized and legitimized as part of the mental health network.