O Work in asylum and post-asylum contexts and their reverberations on mental health (illness or disorder)

Abstract

This text intends to reflect on the meanings of work through praxitherapy, as it occurred in the context of medium and long-term asylums represented in the figure of the Colonies. Our source of historical analysis will be the Colonies and the Asylums, as well as the theoretical production of the psychiatric field. A thread of continuity leads an understanding that understands work as a therapeutic operator of resocialization (a conception born from reflections on the Colonies) to contemporary thinking that the individual's mental health depends on a good relationship with the work represented by work. To this end, we will first explore the material that emerges from the documentary and historiographical research of the collection of mental asylums and, subsequently, we will proceed to problematize issues of the present that carry points of tension between work and mental health in a period marked by the hegemony of post-asylum thinking whose modes of health promotion go through self-management strategies fostered by individual autonomy. The critical analysis of the past will use the Foucaultian genealogical method, as well as methodologies inspired by the production of authors of the "New History". The contemporaneity approach, on the other hand, intends to be leveraged by governmentality research applied to the field of social determinants in mental health (dictated by internationally recognized regulatory bodies and present in the bibliography found on the subject) that contribute to the understanding of some forms of exercise of power in societies demarcated by neoliberal practices.