The condition of the patient in the psychiatric hospital

Abstract

Unpublished translation into Portuguese of the article La condition du malade à l’hôpital psychiatrique, published in a special issue of the French magazine Esprit, number 197, volume 12, December 1952. In this edition, the magazine dedicated a special issue titled Misère de la psychiatrie, focusing on the emerging debate on psychiatric reform. On that occasion, French psychiatrists Louis Le Guillant and Lucién Bonnafé, authors who were still little known in Brazil and, to some extent, also in France, presented a rigorous analysis of the condition of patients in French psychiatric hospitals at the time. However, more than just examining the reality of these institutions, the authors demonstrated how understanding mental illness and its forms of treatment must necessarily be linked to the broader consideration of social living conditions and the need to transform them. They therefore offered a quite original and still relevant contribution to addressing contemporary dilemmas.