The precarity virus, an interlocutor in the construction of mental health policies?

Abstract

From a pandemic context caused by the Covid-19 outbreak, and in order to contribute to the debates about social distancing and isolation as mandatory health measures aimed at mitigating the spread of the virus –reported as practices of care–, here we introduce a review exercise that articulates the disputes about the logics and dynamics that configure the mental health field at the national and local level. This necessarily leads to questions about the implementation of the National Mental Health Law N° 26.657, sanctioned in 2010, whose purpose is the decentralization of care and treatment in psychiatric institutions betting on the solidification of a network of devices anchored in the territory. Therefore, we are interested in focusing on the valorization of lives that were already victims of a closed institutional circuit and how the pandemic situation affects their future. But, in order to understand the recrudescence of the mental institutions logics carried out to face the pandemic, we also believe that doing a systematization to clarify the historical constitution of Córdoba's mental health field could be helpful to understand it. Furthermore, by doing so, we can formulate new questions about the possibilities of access to mental health and the recognition of patients as right-holders.