The paper is about the analysis on the impact of presuppositions underlying the implementation/operation and production of meanings of the so-called "Therapeutic Home Services", emphasizing present discussions on the subject. It points out how such a "arrangement" has been adjusted within different societies which have joined the anti-asylum movement, inspired on Basaglia's work within the Italian psychiatric system. While socially and historically "localizing" the arrangement, they are associated to the usual clashes of opposed realities. The analysis highlights an immanent relationship between culture (values/feelings which prevail among social ways of living) and two antagonistic forms of conceiving life: autopoiese, expansive self-creation or surviving, subject to generic and transcendental laws, which involve external prescriptions and evaluation on the "pertinence" of the living being. Such ontological/epistemological presuppositions emerge as fundamental to the present discussion on insanity, which lacks a more direct and firmer approach in discourses/actions which support the implementation and operation of "therapeutic" homes for those who have been inpatients for an excessive period of time.
Therapeutic homes; de-institutionalization; presuppositions on health