Search

The article analyzes psychology within the Brazilian Mental Hygiene League, an institution founded in 1923 for the adaptation of individuals and to shape the "universal morals of tomorrow." Among other purposes, the league worked to adapt psychological tests and studies on child development in an attempt to assess mental function and establish standards. As an element that helped broaden the power of psychiatry, psychology was involved in two dimensions of disciplinary power: individual bodies and the social body. In this way, psychology also encountered the possibility that it could be vulgarized, as well as contradictions arising from the position of knowledge and techniques in this area.

The scope of this article is to analyze the temporal evolution of the rules that comprise the legal framework of public policies on mental health and on alcohol and other drugs between the years 1900 to 2000. The study seeks to analyze the trajectory of the rules to make it possible to understand a little more about the context and the way in which the issues related to these two themes were addressed prior to the Psychiatric Reform in Brazil, in 2001. For this purpose, documentary and bibliographical research was conducted, with the intention of enhancing the understanding of these two policies from a more normative angle. In the skein of legislation, 33 norms were cataloged which, after analysis, reveal the process of construction of the public policies related to the use of alcohol and other drugs, changing the repressive logic of justice and the "pathologization" of drug use and enabling the transition of the discussion from the field of security to that of public health, more specifically of mental health.

This article reflects on two experiences of applying qualitative life course research in development studies. The first methodology centred on the elicited narratives of older people in Buenos Aires exploring their lifetime relations with their children and their current well-being. The second employed semi-structured interviews with young adults in Zambia to investigate their trajectories towards economic empowerment. In both methodologies, the roles of linked lives and of wider social, economic and political changes were central. The article contributes to critical reflection on methodological choices and trade-offs, by focusing on dilemmas that arise from a desire to address policy makers and more quantitatively-orientated researchers. It explores three themes: the challenges of making sense of disparate narratives of linked lives; the possibilities for engaging with individual subjectivities; and different strategies for situating individual experiences in dynamic social, economic and political contexts.

The article explores the creation of institutions for managing madness and the 'mad' under the First Republic. By focusing specifically on the state of Espírito Santo, it analyzes how the government designed policies for dealing with the mad and asks whether this particular state's experience can validate hypotheses defended for the nation as a whole. The study also aims to demonstrate the complex relations between madness, society, medicine, and the State. A main discussion point is the process by which medicine was transformed into hegemonic knowledge and practice used to justify and validate government guardianship of the mad.

This article presents a brief history of the Brazilian psychiatry reform from the 1980's and 1990's to April 2001, when the Mental Health Law was finally signed. The author discusses the basic concepts that characterize the present condition of the reform as opposed to those of previous initiatives. He also presents a general view of the preceding events to the present process; the concepts and values that characterize the Brazilian reform; the first experiments in São Paulo; the legislative initiative with an analysis of the new law; the different public policies in relation to mental health during the period analyzed with a copy of the Ministry of Health Ordinances 224/92 and 106/2000; the present condition of the de-institutionalization process in the country and the restructuring of the assistance system in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro.

Created in the early 1920s, at a moment when the country's psychiatric field was embracing the preventive outlook, the Liga Brasileira de Higiene Mental included within its members the elite of Brazilian psychiatry, along with a number of physicians and intellectuals. The article discusses the institution's proposals for intervention among children. The league ended up incorporating into its theoretical arsenal the basic themes of mental hygiene and eugenics as part of its general goal of collaborating in Brazil's process of "racial sanitation". With this objective in mind, and viewing the child as a "pre-citizen" who is a "fundamental part within the man of the future", league members included the children's issue in their projects and saw an imperative need for mental health care from early ages on.

This investigation of discourse production in Brazil's field of hygienic psychiatry between the years of 1925 and 1934 explores the relations between psychism and human labor, endeavoring to more precisely define the field's boundaries. We have chosen to designate the knowledge and practices which result from the intersection of these two areas as Labor and mental hygiene. My analytical procedure associated elements of Foucault's "archeology of knowledge" and "genealogy of power" (Foucault, 1995; 1990; 1987), while the Brazilian Mental Hygiene Archives served as the resarch source. The latter documents subsidized analysis of the Brazilian Mental Hygiene League's discourses on relations between labor and mental hygiene. Each one of the texts was analyzed with regard to the dimensions of object, concept, enunciation and theory. The study also explores how the authors and agents of this discourse viewed the social reproduction of the industrial labor force and the status quo.