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Psychic Suffering and Human Rights:
Epistemologies of mental health, politics and activism in psychiatry
Lisbon, Portugal e Salvador, Brazil, c. 1950 – c. 2020
About the Project
Citizenship and human rights of those who live with psychiatric diagnoses constitute virtually the last frontier in the struggles for civil rights that began in the 20th century. This interdisciplinary project analyses the history of human rights in the field of psychiatry and mental health, observing a time frame marked by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and contemporaneity. The team's previous investigation has identified a significant diversity in the ways of formulating, applying, and experiencing human rights in this field. The project’s team has also found a close interdependence between concepts of human rights and forms of knowledge of mental illness and mental health. This relationship has never been studied exhaustively. This project fills this gap by analyzing the relationship between knowledge, concepts of citizenship and patients’ rights. Considering the various historical processes structuring the globalization of mental health, this project embraces two scales, transnational and local, in two cases, Lisbon (Portugal) and Salvador (Bahia, Brazil). The global and local approach will allow us to better understand what separates medical and public health knowledge from the experiential knowledge of persons living with a psychiatric diagnosis, on which their claims for rights are based. It will also allow to analyze the collaborative processes of knowledge construction and the convergences in the way of conceiving the citizenship of a particularly vulnerable population. Observing a temporal arc that extends from the emergence of Mental Health as a scientific and political paradigm, from the mid-twentieth century to the present, this project also follows the transnational and local responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methodology
This project applies global history, oral history, and fieldwork observation methodologies to the history of mental health and psychiatry. Global history allows us to approach the structuring of mental health as a configuration of concepts and values observed from the World War II to the present. Also understood as a methodology, global history allows us to approach the history of science considering, at each moment, the plurality of epistemologies and competing ethical proposals around mental health. The focus on the cases of Portugal-Lisbon and Brazil-Salvador enables the observation of concrete instantiations in the globalization of mental health.

In both cases, psychiatric reform has followed a model of deinstitutionalization. However, while Portugal tends to align itself with the values of Global Mental Health, Brazil presents a unique way of building its field of mental health, based on a radical critique of psychiatric hospitals, and proposing the concept of psychosocial care as a foundation in the reform of psychiatry. Just as Global Mental Health, the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform (BPR) develops a universalizing language of human rights. The team analyzes BPR as a process of globalization of mental health differentiated from the hegemonic Euro-American center.
PSYGLOCAL combines three main forms of data collection, namely, archival analysis, interviews, and participant observation. The team is also committed to the development of new research methodologies, namely based on art and poetic expression.
Ethical Guidelines
This project strictly follows the good practices of scientific research framed by the Ethics Committee of the Center of Social Studies.

Before participating in the research, the interviewees will receive a information sheet presenting the objectives of the project. no research will be carried out without a declaration from the people involved in compliance with the ethical principle of free and informed consent. The project guarantees the anonymity of the interviewees and the confidentiality of any and all information provided. At any time, the interviewees can withdraw from their collaboration in the project. In this case, all related information will be destroyed. Persons can be identified only when they explicitly consider that identification can promote their citizenship rights.
Expected Impact
PSYGLOCAL aims to promote the inclusion of a stigmatized population, often deprived of rights, effective citizenship and access to justice. Specifically, the project proposes forms of participatory decision-making in health policies and aims to contribute to the development of inclusive legislation and institutional practices.

Looking at rights-based responses to mental distress, this project raises the profile of scientific, policy and governance responses converging with the goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the World Health Organization Mental Health Action Plan 2013- 2020.
Communication
This project includes activities aimed at different audiences:

1) Patient/user/ survivor associations and their allies;
2) Individual users of psychiatry and caregivers;
3) High school students;
4) Researchers in the field of human sciences and health sciences;
5) Mental health professionals and jurists working in the area;
6) Social media.

If you wish to collaborate within the scope of this project or give your testimony, you can contact the team here.