Del asilo al activismo. Hacia una antropología política de la salud mental.

Identifier:  TDX:4086

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX4086

Authors:  Morales Sáez, Nicolas

Abstract:
The objective of this thesis is to analyze the political field of mental health in the Southern Area of Santiago de Chile. The theoretical-methodological approach proposes a political anthropology of health through the concepts of political field and political arena, which allow interrogating the relations of hegemony, subalternization and counter-hegemony in Chilean psychiatry. The historiographic review has made it possible to problematize custodialism, to situate the emergence of psychiatric reformism and to characterize the biologist imaginary in asylum and post asylum spaces. The fieldwork consisted of documentary research (El Peral Psychiatric Hospital Archive and other documentary sources); semi-structured and informal interviews with mental health workers, users, first-person activists and key informants; and participant observation in a community mental health center and an activist collective. The main results deepen the articulations between the three subfields (asylum, neo-communitarian and activist), problematize the communitarian legacy in the psychiatric reformism of neoliberal Chile and present a contingent scene of emergence of the first-person movement in mental health. Counter-hegemonic struggles against a biologistic psychiatric practice are sustained by the experience of psychiatric violence, including specific forms of gender violence.