Whitening as a health project: pastoral-colonial updates in practices of psychosocial care

Abstract

The article takes as an analyzer - in the institutionalist sense, that is, as that which has the strength to problematize a regime of truth and a mode of subjectivation indexed to it - a fragment of dialogue between professionals of a public mental health service (Psychosocial Care Center). Thus, it aims to make three issues last that go beyond the production of health-disease-care: weaknesses in the training of professionals for the psychosocial clinic that wants to be anti-asylum; crossing of a specifically Christian religious morality articulated with the morality of the good citizen; and racism as something from which the psychosocial clinic, articulated with the pastoral-modern-colonial project, has avoided looking into each other's eyes since its formulation. It ends with clerical notes that aligned a political-clinical mental health accustomed to listening to other voices and other stories, weaving a counter-memory of the whiteness of psychosocial care practices, making us think about deinstitutionalization as a transvaluation of the morality of our times, affirming an anti-racist and feminist care, in confluence with popular knowledge and the territories pregnant with life.