.
Psychiatric Hospital; Archeology; Genealogy; Mental health; Psychosocial Attention.
The history of madness in Brazil is indissociable from the history of psychiatric hospitals,
since the organization of cities and their hygiene, based on the French mold of the nineteenth
century, depended on these institutions for the maintenance of social order. The internment
houses had the principle of instituting an organization to the nascent capitalist and bourgeois
society, giving shelter to madmen, beggars, prostitutes and all those who put at risk the
ongoing development project, also attending to the charitable ideal, one of the pillars of
society Of the time. The Cariri region of Ceará counted on the existence of a psychiatric
hospital, the Casa de Saúde Santa Teresa, which operated from the 1970s until the year 2016.
Its inauguration was not a randomness, but the fruit of specific discursive formations and
relations of Knowledge and power that constituted the foundation for the hospital to open its
doors in the region, and to stay in operation until the year 2016. The objective of this work is
to construct an archegenealogical analysis of the history of the Casa de Saúde Santa Teresa. In
order to do so, it is proposed to work with analysis of newspapers, magazines and
photographs illustrative of the institution, which make it possible to preserve the memory of a
time and people, but especially the recognition of the sustaining forces of this institution. In
addition to two important journalistic publications of Cariri Cearense (A Ação newspaper and
Itaytera magazine - from 1963 to 1990), the newspapers O povo, Diário do Nordeste and
Jornal do Cariri (1990 to 2016) were consulted. The images were divided into three blocks of
time, namely: 1900 to 1970, when the hospital opened; 1970-1990, years of well-functioning
Health House and 1990-2016, period of tensions and closure of the hospital. In these same
documentary sources, data were sought for the economic, political and cultural
contextualization of the municipality of Crato, in order to articulate the history and discourses
about the hospital with the political and cultural productions. The result is an archegeneal
analysis of the history of a psychiatric hospital located in the south of Ceará, told through
news articles, magazines and illustrative photographs, pointing out the knowledge and power
relations of psychiatric asylum logic as a mechanism of exclusion, as well as allowing
analysis Of the deconstruction of the hospital-centered model in Brazil as a result of the
Psychiatric Reform movement.