This study aims to discuss the meanings of madness festival held in Barbacena. Realized documental analysis of published reports, the period 2006 to 2010, newspapers in local, state and national. Data were analyzed from the methodological framework of the Collective Subject Discourse. The meanings of madness festival identified were: event of multiple partners, unexpected, academic, cultural, tourist, controversial, paradigm shift and a historical. The meanings found express the socio-cultural dimension of the process of Psychiatric Reform and points out that to understand the paradigm shift in mental health and understand the policy changes requires attention to a historical, political and social.
Psychiatric Reform; culture; history of psychiatry