Stultifera domus. Del manicomio a la institución doméstica total: vida cotidiana, familia y esquizofrenia

Identifier:  TDX:3813

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX3813

Authors:  Alegre Agís, Elisa

Abstract:
After Spanish psychiatric reform, people diagnosed with Severe Mental Disorder (SMD) moved from being confined in mental hospitals to live at home. In the existing model of ambulatory care, adults with SMD are taken care for by their families, especially their mothers. This research presents a historiographical analysis of the old asylum model, and an ethnographic analysis of the daily lives of people diagnosed with SMD and their family caregivers. Both aspects lead to a comparison of the two models, based on the hypothesis of the custodial and asylum logic reproduction in the domestic space. The aim of this research was to elucidate how much of these dynamics are maintained, what they are and how they function in the family home. The ethnographic analysis was carried out with diagnosed people, family caregivers and professionals, in associations and facilities of the Catalonian network for public mental health care. The results show numerous custodial dynamics typically described for total institutions in the domestic space, which allow us to speak of a «total domestic institution», with many consequences: caregiving mothers have an enormous care overload that affects their well-being, and diagnosed people experience an erosion of their autonomy, while they lead in a contradictory identity of «total patient» and a «liminal identity». Tutored and regulated life, surveillance, self- reclusion and isolation, absence of or limited social insertion, among other issues that occur at present at home, are like the daily circumstances lived by the insane in the old asylums.