An assessment of Brazilian Psychiatric Reform: Institutions, Actors and Policies

Abstract

The article takes a look at Brazilian Psychiatric Reform over the past decade, after the approval of Federal Law 10.216/2001 and seeks to elicit long overdue discussion about the pressing challenges that Brazilian Psychiatric Reform needs to tackle to promote or review the long-desired utopia of ""full citizenship for all in a society without asylums."" Is the Reform showing signs of exhaustion? The redirection of the care model for Mental Health in Brazil from the hospital to the community over the past decade is an undeniable achievement. Taking the use of psychoactive substances as the scope of policy and intervention, this incorporates complex demands that the current Crack drama makes it more urgent to question its history, its limits, its power. What will keep the flame alight of a successful movement that, surprisingly, has resisted the force of time and stigma in the ten years since the Law was enacted? These and other questions need to be worked on. It is time to recycle the focus of assessment and analysis in order to identify what threatens its vitality. This is the challenge to which the writer and debaters will be enjoined to contribute.