This paper deals with the construction of the mental disturbance in the speech of a Psychosocial Attendance center patients and their family members. It is a qualitative research that has a theoretical methodological approach related to the Social Discursive Psychology. 15 patients of a CAPS - Psychological Attendance center of campina Grande have been interviewed as well as 15 family members. Along the elaborations about the determinant causes of the mental disease have been detected biological, socioeconomic, psychosocial, psychological and supernatural causes. Besides, in the discursive elaborations about the symptoms and signals of the mental disease the way it shows up, predominated descriptions that denote that the mental patient is not seen as a person capable of independency, but as a person who’s not able to think, a person whose main characteristics are the lack of control and the criminal tendency. That means that the discourses describe a mental patient with the same terms found in the psychiatric speech used to justify the madhouse structure, discourses that reproduce the stereotype about madness that prevails in the social imaginary.
Speech; Mental disease; Family; Psychiatric reform