The aim of this article is to question a very important device of the actual Brazilian psychiatric reform process: psycho-social rehabilitation. The authors formulated a hypothesis that the creation of new forms of treatment in mental health does not determine that the mentally-diseased can effectively assume the condition of a citizen. Old functional sanatorium principles may be present, being the basis of services and practices. It has been observed that the psychosocial rehabilitation has a great importance in the interviewed people's lives; however it presents the risk of promoting the maintenance of the "psychiatrized" condition. In order to think about this question, we have to turn to Michel Foucault's Genealogy, which consists in the problematization of the practices of power underlying the contemporary psychiatry discourses in Brazil.
Psychosocial rehabilitation; psychiatric reform; mental health