Public care in the psychiatric area in Brazil has been the scene of constant change over the last three decades in order to ensure the provision of treatment guided by human rights and the principle of social inclusion of the patient. One of the challenges present in these transformations is to alter the use of public asylum macro-institutions, built predominantly in the first half of the twentieth century and which over the decades have effectively become places of social exclusion. A historical review of these institutions can help to understand the reasons for their creation and the ways in which they have been refurbished and maintained for so long, despite contemporary thinking regarding their low therapeutic efficacy.
It is this historical view that the article “From the agricultural colony to the hospital-colony: configurations for psychiatric care in Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century,” by Ana Teresa A. Venancio, aims to bring to the reader. It reveals some of the results of the research project entitled “Actors, ideas, and practices in psychiatry and the social construction of differences (Rio de Janeiro, 1903-1970),” coordinated by the researcher, which analyzes the ways in which psychiatry through social actors, ideas and sundry practices contributed to the social construction of differences in Rio de Janeiro in the first half of the twentieth century. The paper was presented at the International Seminar on State, Philanthropy and Care, sponsored by the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz and staged in Rio de Janeiro in November 2009.
The primary sources used in the work include ministerial documents, institutional reports, photographs, legislation, scientific papers and articles published in newspapers of the day. The author describes and analyzes the reasons that led to the introduction of these two institutional models, namely the agricultural colony and the hospital-colony in Rio de Janeiro. It shows who the personages involved in the construction of this brand of psychiatric care were, the difficulties they faced, the relationship between this specific form of care and the broader guidelines for the field of health and how this construction was based on both the scientific precepts of the day and the belief of the protagonists that they were doing the best for the country in terms of medical mental care. The analysis presented takes as a case study the history of the Juliano Moreira Colony, a psychiatric institution founded in 1924 under the name of the Colony for Male Psychopaths (and renamed the Juliano Moreira Colony in 1935), located in the district of Jacarepaguá (Rio de Janeiro) considered a rural area of the city at the time. Based on this case study the author highlights the principles behind this medical-psychiatric institutional project of the beginning of the century marked by practical therapy and in-family care and the way in which already in the 1940s such guidelines were combined with a new institutional model of the hospital variety.
The article “From the agricultural colony to the hospital-colony: configurations for psychiatric care in Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century,” by Ana Teresa A. Venancio, was recently published in the journal História, Ciências, Saúde Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro, vol. 18, suppl. 1, December 2011.
