Difficult memories: Hospital Colônia de Barbacena, Brazilian psychiatric reform and the political uses of a painful past

Abstract

The present article deals with a room for memory created in a psychiatric institution. It is the Museum of Madness, close to Barbacena’s Colony Hospital (State of Minas Gerais). Complaints about degrading conditions of intern patients at the hospital gain notoriety by the end of the 70’s and defined the beginning of discussions over the Psychiatric Reform in Brazil. We try to question here the Museum’s creation as an allegory of discourse on Reform, by analyzing the political use of memories marked by the suffering, which made facts formerly unknown public.