ABSTRACT
The Brazilian Psychiatric Reform law reconfigured the mental health care model in the country, with the main repercussion being the change from an asylum treatment regime to community-based treatment, carried out, mainly in the various types of Psychosocial Care Centers. The Brazilian Anti-Asylum Movement that denounced the corruption of the hospital model system and the violation of human rights in the asylums headed the demand for a change in the assistance model. For example, in the Hospital Colônia from Barbacena (MG), around 60 thousand people died, a fact portrayed in the book ‘Brazilian Holocaust’ by Daniela Arbex. In this essay, we will approach Arbex’s work in the light of the post-colonial and biopolitical debate, which understands that the modes of production of banal evil found in colonized societies a form of action, perpetuation, and naturalization of the depersonalization of the human, bringing them closer to the notion of object. The present work aims at questioning the treatment given, in the past, to madness within the asylums, as a kind of manifestation of the banal evil in the Brazilian colonial context, at the same time as it predicts the resumption of the hospital model discourse, now in a new guise, in Brazilian public policies.
KEYWORDS
Colonialism; Hospital psyquiatric; Mental health