Since the seventies Brazil has witnessed a diversity of new proposals in the field of mental health care. Since then, the psychology and psychiatry ambulatories, day-hospitals, therapeutical shelters and psychosocial care centers have multiplied. Transformed into a public policy, the psychosocial care centers are spread all over the country, offering outpatient care with interdisciplinary and territorial orientation. Generally established under the auspices of a great hospital, the psychiatrist who considers working from a psychosocial perspective in a small city, has to deal with the classic contradictions of the psychiatric discourse. The varied local knowledge seems to threat the psychiatric knowledge. Answers, easy to be given in the hospital, have different implications in the field and acquire a complexity for which the psychiatrist is not prepared. Thus, this work tries to demonstrate the differences between these two kinds of psychiatry: the classic one (concerned with biology and the institution) and the psychosocial one (seeking for locally constructed answers and concerned with the human being in a dimension reaching far beyond the body).
Mental health; Community psychiatry; Mental health services