May 17, 2022

The anti-asylum movement fights for just mental healthcare

topic:	Health and Sanitation
located:	Brazil, Argentina
editor:	Ellen Nemitz

In Brazil, 18 May marks the Anti-Asylum Fight Day. For decades, this movement of mental-health workers and human-rights defenders has tried to make society aware of the serious violations carried out in mental asylums. A lot has changed since their first manifestos were released in the 1980's, especially after the approval of the Psychiatric Reform in 2001, which led to the creation of a Psychosocial Care Network that became an international reference for humanised mental-health care. 

Since the mid 2010's, however, the financial resources allocated to these facilities have shrunk, flowing instead towards psychiatric hospitals or therapeutic communities - institutions, usually linked to religious organisations, that offer treatments to people with a problematic dependence of alcohol or other drugs and that focus on separating them from their homes and families, sending them to remote places far from cities. The report "​​Public funding of Brazilian therapeutic communities between 2017 and 2020" from the human rights NGO Conectas shows that approximately $100 million was invested in three years to these controversial institutions. 

Furthermore, according to an inspection carried out in 2017, in all 28 therapeutic communities analysed there was some degree of at least one type of human rights violation. Leonardo Pinho, president of Abrasme (Brazilian Association of Mental Health), participated in the release event of Conectas' report and assessed that the therapeutic communities are installed without a clear and transparent project built upon the participation of the civil society. It is not, therefore, a proper public policy, as therapeutic communities rely exclusively on "political lobbying," he says. 

A constant fight against asylums and madhouses - or whatever replacements are created afterwards - also happens in other Latin American countries. In Argentina, for example, the law to combat asylums was signed in 2010, but there have been few advances since then, according to the Observatory of Mental Health and Human Rights of the province of Córdoba: "Some of the slogans ('A 2020 without asylums') that accompanied the sanctioned norms ended up being mere expressions of wishes. The governments responsible for the implementation process, whether due to a lack of commitment or political will, ineptitude or apathy, never made the necessary investments to carry out the enormous challenges posed by the regulations."  

Back to Brazil, a manifesto written by a group of psychologists for the celebrations of 18 May, 2022 tells the story of madness, even preceding madhouses as we currently know them. In the 15th century, it reads, the "ships of the mads" would take undesirable people away from society, "not to find a cure, not to dock somewhere" but "with no destination, just to drive them away." Authors then compare these boats to the ones used to transport slaves, which crossed the seas just to take black people from freedom to forced work, in order to affirm that nowadays asylum and policies for the war on drugs are designed to enforce racism.

"The selectivity with which black and white people who use drugs are treated is wide open," the text assesses. "Only by understanding the complexity of structural racism and the wounds of the asylum and the war on drugs will we, in fact, advance in the care of those people excluded in the name of mental suffering." 

Image by Hans Eiskonen

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