Psychiatric Experiments with "Community" Under Dictatorship and Authoritarianism

The Case of the Protected Commune Experience, 1980-1989

Bibliographic Data

ID2059341
AuthorsC R Montenegro (0000-0001-9291-267X, University of Exeter, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume48
Issue4
Pages677-698
Publication date2024-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCulture Medicine and Psychiatry (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0165-005X • E-ISSN: 1573-076X
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s11013-024-09868-2
PMID38951362
OpenAlexW4400193985
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited37

In Chile, a long and oppressive military regime (1973-1990) dismantled emergent initiatives for the deinstitutionalisation of psychiatric care, imposing a neoliberal constitution that opened public services to market forces and limited the state's role in health and social care. After being associated with communism and socialism, community-based mental health work was banned, and socialist psychiatrists were silenced through torture or exile. However, some therapeutic initiatives persisted, such as the "Protected Commune" (PC) initiative within the El Peral psychiatric asylum. The PC attempted to mimic a real town inside the asylum's gated perimeter. It featured an ecumenical chapel, a school, and various "council" departments like recreation, education, waste, economy, and health. Paths received names, wards became districts, and patients and workers were assigned new, democratic roles, all while the authoritarian regime entirely controlled the "outside" world. The initiative ceased with the return of democracy in 1990. Deemed an eccentric and negligible episode, the PC is often seen as an interruption to the radical community-based experiences of the pre-dictatorial era. Drawing on archival research and oral history interviews with participants, this paper examines how the PC harnessed the notion of community to navigate the complex socio-political landscape of the dictatorship. Differing from established accounts of the political uses of psychiatry under authoritarianism, the study positions the PC as a prism for understanding the contradictory ways in which the idea of 'community' has been able to transcend radically opposed social and political regimes, becoming a core feature in the vocabulary of mental health reform, despite its ambiguities

Authoritarianism · Democracy · Dictatorship · Political science · Psychiatry · Public health · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Psychology