PUBLICATIONS - Psyglocal

Mental Health and Human Rights in Portugal and Brazil

Tiago Pires Marques, Sílvia Portugal (EdsMental Health and Human Rights in Portugal and Brazil.)

This book explores the relationship between conceptions of human rights and models of knowledge of illness and mental health, articulating global, national and local perspectives. The eight chapters deal with various themes: the development of the concept of mental health in the post-war period; the role of the World Health Organisation in psychiatric epidemiology; the artistic activism of psychiatric patients; the mental health reforms in Portugal (1963-2024); the Psychiatric Reform in Bahia, Brazil; the role of documentaries in denouncing conditions in psychiatric hospitals; and two case studies on associations - ADEB (Lisbon) and artistic and cultural initiatives in the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform. The book uses diverse methodologies, building new critical perspectives on emancipation in mental health.

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Knowledge, experiences and struggles for full citizenship in psychiatry and mental health

Tiago Pires Marques, Sílvia Portugal (Eds.)

Issue 42 (2025) of e-cadernos CES addresses the theme “Knowledge, experiences and struggles for full citizenship in psychiatry and mental health”, providing a critical and interdisciplinary analysis of the living conditions and challenges faced by people with mental suffering in society. The issue brings together articles that discuss the tensions between institutional psychiatric practices and human rights, as well as exploring alternative forms of care, such as cultural and spiritual influences on psychiatric treatment. Issues such as community participation, stigma and gender and class issues in mental health experiences are also addressed. With a comprehensive approach that includes perspectives from different countries, the magazine offers an in-depth reflection on building full and inclusive citizenship for users, patients and survivors of psychiatry.

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The obscene and the voice in the psychiatric hospital world

Besides the anti-psychiatry and psychiatric reform texts, there is a particularly rich collection of documentaries - by amateurs and professional filmmakers - which, in depicting the horrors of the psychiatric hospital, deserve the attention of historians. In particular, the production and public viewing of documentaries in the 1960s and 1970s remain poorly analyzed.

The ‘social’ in psychiatry and mental health: quantification, mental illness and society in international scientific networks (1920s–1950s)

The post-World War II international mental health movement placed significant emphasis on the concept of the ‘social environment’, a true paradigm shift in thinking about the causes of mental illness. Rather than focusing on individual risk factors, experts and policy-makers began to consider the interplay between social context and mental health and illness. Also, during this period, quantification gained prominence within the expanding field of Western psychiatry. Eventually, the concept of the ‘social’ became fragmented into quantifiable social determinants that could be correlated with mental illness and subjected to systematic neutralization. This trajectory paved the way for the prevailing biomedical psychiatric epidemiology. This broader inquiry challenges us to redefine our understanding of the ‘social’ in the context of mental health research and practice.

Solidarity, militancy and mental health in times of pandemic

Based on digital network narratives, we analyzed various forms of solidarity actions negotiated by users of the mental health care network to deal with the problems arising from the Covid-19 pandemic in a context of ultra-neoliberal economy. If, on the one hand, the increase in psychosocial suffering was evident, on the other hand, the coping strategies organized by those people were astounding, many of them being developed and managed by themselves. Among these strategies, there is the activation and creation of social networks for specific purposes depending on the problem to be solved. [...]

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Previous Team Publications

What do crazy people dream of? Life projects of mental health users

This article aims to understand the life projects formulated by people with experience of severe psychic suffering and abusive use of alcohol and other drugs in the process of deinstitutionalization in mental health. In order to do so, an ethnographic study was developed, with the purpose of identifying interactions between deinstitutionalization operators, which can be understood as processes, dynamics or actions that act on the daily life and social insertion of these subjects. It was possible to verify that the texture of these projects towards the future presents itself as a work of self-care in Foucauldian terms, in which different meanings of health are handled, as conceived by Fassin (2000).

Anthropological intersections in mental health: from naturalistic regimes of truth to the biopsychosociocultural thickness of mental illness

In contemporary psychiatry, a transnational hegemonic project centered on a naturalistic discourse about mental illness propagates a regime of truth anchored in the proposal of explaining its pathophysiology and of controlling its treatment. Despite its diffusion, this discourse has a different impact on specific cultural contexts, showing socioanthropological modulations of biotherapies in the concrete health status of people and the uses and meanings attributed to diagnoses. This article reviews three different perspectives depending on the context, emphasizing intersections between history, culture, society and biology in the anchorage of mental diseases.

Legitimacies of madness. Suffering, struggle, creativity and belonging

From a wide diversity of perspectives and contexts, using different methodologies and styles, this book shows that madness, from the sufferings common to diagnosed disorders, lighter or more severe, reflects the violence of multiple structural factors of contemporary society. Poverty and precariousness, the multiple forms of discrimination and oppression, but also some of the devices intended for healing and care, which produce suffering, exclusion and internalized stigma. Fighting for a more just society involves identifying the ways in which this society produces suffering in its individuals and taking steps to reduce it.

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