Vontade e juízo na avaliação psiquiátrica das internações involuntárias

Abstract

This work is a reflection on the criteria used in psychiatric practice to justify involuntary detention and treatment. The restriction of freedom is an infringement of human rights, and if it is to be justified on the grounds of mental pathology, it must be legally and ethically qualified. Historically, long term internment of people in psychiatric institutions led to social exclusion and the rupture of importante social and personhood ties. Emergency hospitalization is often justified on the grounds of risk. Hence, a critical analysis is offered (along the lines of Derrida s deconstruction and Foucault s genealogy), of our current medical-psychiatric understanding, which is the foundation of all clinical work. An overview of the many arrangements for psychiatric involuntary detention on a variety of Western countries demonstrates an interplay between medical and legal (rights based) models. These arrangements all come with benefits and challenges. The medicalization of human life is a modern, world-wide phenomenon, and is viewed as a dynamics process where the appropriation of medical categories by users and their families also produces empowerment and change. We see how, historically, moral bias of practice performed at psychiatric hospitals is inseparable to knowledge construction, and oficial psychopathology is a descriptive nosology, but clinical practice allows other psychopathologies, more participative ones, centered on the relations between the subject and the world, which may help him to understand and survive life experiences. Thus classical pathology adopts a rational aristotelian approach to understanding the concept of Will, while the philosophical view of Arendt emphasizes the centrality of freedom and spontaneity. The inherent dichotomy between free Will and determinism leads to clinical and legal repercussions, in the case of assessing a patient s level of responsibility for his actions. In this field, as in the evaluation of a patient s level of insight, science does not warrant total objectivity. Hence the decisions about psychiatric involuntary detention will always depend on the basis of the complex interplay between politics, morality and ethics, basis of all clinical work.