The focus of Mental Health Care in Brazil has been on community psychiatric care services that replace the asylum model. However, individuals with mental disorders continue to shift between community services and psychiatric hospitals, besides becoming a target of the disciplinarization and violence that question the quality of the nursing care being delivered. The objective of this study is to understand the ontology of nursing care in psychiatric hospitalization. Participants were four individuals with mental disorders who attended a center for psychosocial care, who agreed to talk about their psychiatric hospitalization experience by means of a semi-directed interview. The subjects remembered about their psychiatric hospitalization and assigned meanings to it. Heidegger's Existential Analysis was used, and thus generated the Meaning Unit: Being-in-the-world cared with impersonality; which allowed to unveil the phenomenon through Dasein's structure, and thus made it possible to outline the ontological care in nursing in psychiatric hospitals.
Mental health; Psychiatric nursing; Hospitals, psychiatric; Mental Health Services