This paper discusses gender issues present in the mental health field in Brazil developed during the de-institutionalizing process of psychiatric reform. It develops a data analysis from an ethnographic study conducted between 2010 and 2011, in the Brazilian cities of Joinville-SC and Barbacena-MG as well as in Turin, Trieste and Gorizia in Italy. The guiding questions for these discussions relate to the significant presence of gender in the experiences launched by the deinstitutionalization process along the psychiatric reform in Brazil, regarding the care practices and the modes of subjectivity of women and men as users of the services that substituted the psychiatric hospital.
Gender; Modes of subjectivity; Mental health; Psychiatric reform