• Presentation
• When we return home
• Going Back Home
• The Therapeutic Residences
• The Brazilian Psychiatric Reform and the Mental Health Policy
• Barbacena
• The change of the attention paradigm to the sufferers of Mental Illnesses
• Portraits
• Crossing barriers - Going Back Home
• Credits
• Essa página em Português

Crossing barriers - Going Back Home

Each with their own timing needs to start from scratch: reorganize their bodies, learn to take care of themselves, learn to look both ways when crossing the road, to walk into a store and ask for what they need. They need to learn how to deal with money: The value of the bills (“the note with the jaguar is the best”) and the value of things. They need to learn not to be cheated on by those who want to take advantage of what they carry in their wallets or what they store at the bank. It’s a difficult and complicated learning process, toilsome for them and the house keepers and technicians.

The daily lives of the residences in which the survivors of the long confinement in psychiatric wards stay is infused by a bustle, a routine full of chores that include taking care of the house and the other inhabitants.

Some have already gotten jobs, and beyond the Going Back program and the benefit of continuous contribution ( a benefit guaranteed by the constitution in 1988 to the disabled or the elderly over 67), they receive salaries in exchange for services rendered: Sebastiana, resident of a therapeutic residence, lives alone and takes care of the other occupants of the house, Valdevino goes from home to home delivering the weekly groceries: Fruit, vegetables, eggs, meat; Élcio is an office boy for an organization, João wanted to be a waiter so bad that his wish made a partnership with SENAC hotel management course possible. Other partnerships are being established with craftsmen from the city and the job opportunities come up.

The web expands, and overtakes the limits of the health services. The web includes neighbors, the caretakers, the technicians, teachers of many different kinds, the merchants. Everyone effects and is effected by the insane who now roam free in the city and they also generate and cause the production of capital. With the benefits they receive they buy goods, and employ services: they employ cleaners, drivers, washerwomen, manicurists…

They live with their madness, (more evident than ours) and show that they can coexist with it, without it being a key issue. Were not condemning the mentally disturbed. They crave to live.