Clinical-Institutional Effects of an Art Workshop for Individuals with Psychotic Disorders in a Therapeutic Residential Service

Abstract

After the Psychiatric Reform, art became a widely disseminated resource in mental health. In this study it appears in the form of artistic workshops with psychotic patients in a facility - Therapeutic Residential Services - located in the city of Fortaleza-CE. Such equipment aims to deal with the challenge of inhabiting the city, and living in society for people who are prevented from this right due to long periods of institutionalization in a psychiatric hospital. Given this, this study aimed to investigate the institutional and clinical effects of holding artistic workshops in a Therapeutic Residential Service, articulating enclosure and its possible re-enactments. This is qualitative research of empirical nature with a psychoanalytic bias carried out from December 2020 to August 2021. The residents of the Therapeutic Residential Service went through a process of subjective appropriation of the house, which made them turn inward. In the impossibility of the Outside, they returned to the Inside. Through these experiences with art, they were able to (re)enact a reality that did not exist before. It is concluded that the group with psychotic patients has its own functioning that requires a careful look from the researcher in order not to fall into a neurotic orthopaedics of the psychotic subject.