This paper aims to weave some theoretical considerations directed at the practice of therapeutic accompaniment (TA) with long-term patients discharged from psychiatric hospitals. It seeks to articulate the TA in a rehabilitative dimension which aims to increase the degree of autonomy, psychosocial functioning and community integration of these users. Regarded as practices articulated to the users' daily life context, the psychosocial rehabilitation and the therapeutic accompaniment are powerful strategies which may contribute to the expansion of the psychosocial care mode and to ensure the rights of users with mental disorders, especially regarding assistance and social support. Distanced from an adaptationist perspective, the rehabilitation as a social recontracting possibility, in conjunction with the practice of TA, may help to equate the challenge of social reinsertion currently put to mental health policy in Brazil. In other words, they may become a device to expand the possibilities of movement in the city, to structure everyday life, helping to avoid the isolation, the abandonment, the chronicity effect and the institutionalization, so frequently observed in this population which experiences a variety of rights violation.
psychosocial rehabilitation; therapeutic accompaniment; mental health; social reinsertion