From dream to madness: Portuguese and mental illness in São Paulo (1929-1939)

• Grant number: 13/05777-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: December 01, 2013
• End date: November 30, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Brazil
• Principal Investigator: Ana Lúcia Lana Nemi
• Grantee: Ewerton Luiz Figueiredo Moura da Silva
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 11/14275-6 - Education and health among the public and private: the experience of complex HSP / SPDM / EPM-UNIFESP (1956-2010), AP.JP

Abstract

The city of São Paulo has undergone dizzying urban and industrial growth in the early decades of the twentieth century, attracted by employment opportunities for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including Portuguese, landed in the country. New customs and claims, as well as tensions in the workplace, were some of the consequences of the impact of growth spurt. In this context, the government sought to improve their devices for social control aiming suppress and eliminate resistance to discipline and order within the city. In the late nineteenth to the twentieth century medical science gained strength and importance, particularly psychiatry, mental medicine has emerged as a powerful ally of the state to maintain social order and harmony. As a result of this alliance in 1898 opened the Psychiatric Hospital of Juquery and, 31 years later, to meet the constant demand for new beds, the Sanatorium of Pirituba Pinel. The position of the immigrant in this scenario is quite revealing, its project of social ascension bumped the problem of mental illness. Instead of conquering the dream of "making America" and return to the homeland, many of them found the madness and are ended his days hospitalized and monitored within walls built not to disturb the order of the world outside. This work aims to bring out the drama of thousands of Portuguese hospitalized in mental institutions. (AU)