The paths of mental health care: psychosocial care as a care

This paper presents some considerations about the advances, permanence, and ruptures of Mental Health policies in Brazil, aiming to understand the conception of care present in the Psychosocial Care Network (RAPS) from the perspective of the people who use the services. This is an ethnographic research, carried out in the city of Juazeiro/BA. We worked with the theoretical and methodological framework of Discursive Psychology and Social Constructionism. The results show an expansion of the care network, in which the centrality of the psychiatric hospital in the city is blurred by the offer of substitutive services that will constitute the local RAPS. However, these services still carry the legacy of the hegemonic iatrogenic asylum model. For users, Psychosocial Care represents a care in freedom and the guarantee of open-door community service enables production and affirmation of life. Although these are territories in dispute, they point to possible paths of political appropriation among the contradictions operated by the process of psychiatric reform in Brazil.