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This article aimed to unveil the dilemmas and setbacks in the lives of families in situations of social vulnerability within today's context of psychiatric deinstitutionalization. The quanti-qualitative research was based on specialized bibliography, documents, semi-structured interviews and floating observation, was carried out at the Public Defender's Office whose subjects are families with psychiatric demands assisted by the institution's Social Service and seek for legal assistance to guarantee mentally impaired people the social rights that had been denied to them at the administrative scope. The study found that the members of these families face dilemmas and setbacks both on the micro-familiar level, through conflicts involving financial, physical and emotional matters marked by the pressure and the overload of the situation as a whole; as well as on the macro-social level, due to the growing process of family centralization before the lack of State protection and the structural illnesses of a policy based on global and economic interests that echoes into the promotion of social protection policies. Therefore, one concludes that such issues need to be widely discussed in order to closely observe these families' demands, since not meeting their needs may incur risks to the advances of psychiatric deinstitutionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]