Work and labour as strategies for mental health care

This study refers to the legal and political propositions of Labour as a strategy for Mental Health Care in Brazil. We map the composition of forces of this articulation in psychiatric legislation and mental health policies. We problematise the concepts of work that feed the discourse present in the documents, as well as the meanings that emerge from these productions. In our discussions, we pointed out that labour as a modality of care in nursing homes did not emerge from the universe of psychiatry, but from capitalism. Initially associated with measures to occupy the empty minds of the unfit, it later became an instrument of discipline and social normalisation. With the Psychiatric Reform, Mental Health Work activities are reinvented as spaces that enable access to life in society and citizenship for people suffering from mental illness. In questioning what makes the issue of madness in conjunction with labour and work the target of public policies, it becomes clear that political production acts on the basis of particular and historically constituted rationalities, which are never universal.