The mental health field in the province of Santa Fe. Towards a historization of public policies, senses and practices

Abstract

The development and consolidation of the mental health field in Argentina was linked to the processes of reforms that took place at international scale linked to serious human rights violations committed in psychiatric institutions. Since the middle of the 20th century, the central role of the psychiatric hospital and hospitalization as the only answer to address subjective suffering began to be strongly questioned. Santa Fe was one of the pioneering provinces in mental health reform in our country, converging by the late 1980s into a new epistemological, methodological and legal approach on public assistance to psychic suffering, that was materialised in the Provincial Law N° 10.772 in 1991. In this paper, from an anthropological perspective, we propose to systematize the reform process of the mental health field in the province of Santa Fe since the passing of this law, identifying the key events and actors in this process.