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This article analyzes the psychiatric medicalization of women in three Brazilian women's prisons, from the fields of mental health, the anthropology of confinement, and gender studies. A qualitative study employing ethnographic methods was carried out from October 2006 to February 2007, which included participant observation, informal conversations, semi-structured interviews, and life histories. Understood as a state device of power, psychiatric medicalization processes are marked by three itineraries: the mass criminalization of women, pathologization of women's crimes, and psychiatric pharmaceuticalization (especially through the administration of psychoactive drugs). These processes thus establish a vicious cycle that perpetuates or produces the disorders that psychiatry seeks to heal and enables the continuity of drug use (illicit-licit-illicit) and its ties to the illegal drug market, while highlighting how gender - in its intersections with other categories of differentiation - influences the production of mental illnesses, which must be treated as a public health problem that extends beyond the walls of women's prisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]