Fragmentos de vidas contadas: a psiquiatria e a loucura feminina em Campina Grande-PB (1980-2005).

Abstract

In 2005, the Hospital João Ribeiro, located in Campina Grande-PB, was closed by the Ministry of Health due to complaints of poor hospital conditions, thus “in fact” psychiatric reform was instituted in the city. The objective of this work is the analysis of several discourses that the so-called crazy woman constructed throughout her life trajectory, using medical documentation prepared in 2005, of women interned at the aforementioned hospital. We seek to understand how narratives and meanings given to fragments of life stories crossed by the stigma of “madness”; as well as analyzing how institutionalized women had their significant identities and subjectivities through the process of psychiatric institutionalization. Furthermore, we seek to problematize the actors, practices and places of madness in the city in the 1980s, a period in which the protagonists of our history were inmates. With this text, we use the newspapers of Diário da Borborema and Jornal da Paraíba, to understand the discourses of local psychiatry. As a theoretical-methodological contribution, we dialogued with Michel Foucault, based on the concept of madness, knowledge / power and discourse; and with Judith Butler through her conception of gender identity subversion.