The Management of Citizenship: Ethnography in a Psychosocial Care Centre

Based on fieldwork at the Esperança Psychosocial Care Centre (CAPS) in the eastern region of Campinas, the author describes how therapeutic practices are organised. In particular, she analyses the reflections of professionals on their care practices. In a context of transformations in psychiatric care, which were most intense in the 1990s, some events that enabled the creation of CAPS Esperança are mentioned. The dynamics of the technical team's functioning and the way collective work is organised according to the practices carried out were also analysed. The author shows how a new care technology is operationalised through the practice of therapeutic listening and medication adjustment. Her main objective was to analyse how professionals conceptualise their daily experiences, as well as how users are examined and managed through care interventions, which in their effects produce subjects who are citizens constituted by their symptoms and sufferings.