Psychiatric medicalization in three Brazilian women's prisons: an ethnographic approach to the itineraries of criminalization, pathologization and pharmaceuticalization

Abstract

This article analyzes the psychiatric medicalization of women in three Brazilian women's prisons, from the fields of mental health, the anthropology of confinement, and gender studies. A qualitative study employing ethnographic methods was carried out from October 2006 to February 2007, which included participant observation, informal conversations, semi-structured interviews, and life histories. Understood as a state device of power, psychiatric medicalization processes are marked by three itineraries: the mass criminalization of women, pathologization of women's crimes, and psychiatric pharmaceuticalization (especially through the administration of psychoactive drugs). These processes thus establish a vicious cycle that perpetuates or produces the disorders that psychiatry seeks to heal and enables the continuity of drug use (illicit-licit-illicit) and its ties to the illegal drug market, while highlighting how gender - in its intersections with other categories of differentiation - influences the production of mental illnesses, which must be treated as a public health problem that extends beyond the walls of women's prisons.