This study aims to present considerations from hygienists about the open services for mental health developed in Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century. We analyze publications from the Archivos Brasileiros de Hygiene Mental and other materials (1925-1955), and find that the possibility of treating people in psychic suffering in freedom (defended by the current psychiatric reform) was already glimpsed by hygienists, however, in a period during which mental health assistance was hegemonically based on isolation within psychiatric institutions.
Mental hygiene; history of psychiatry; psychiatric reform; mental health services