PSYCHIATRY AND RACISM – THE PSYCHIATRIC HOLOCAUST IN THE BARBACENA ASYLUM AND RACISM AGAINST BLACKS IN BRAZIL

Abstract

This article makes a critical analysis of psychiatric practices in Brazil based on the emblematic case of the Hospital Colônia de Barbacena, located in Minas Gerais, known as the scene of a true "psychiatric holocaust". Through a historical-social approach, it seeks to show how psychiatry, far from being configured only as medical-scientific knowledge, was used as a tool of exclusion, control, and oppression, especially against black, poor, and marginalized subjects. Compulsory hospitalization, arbitrary diagnosis, and dehumanizing treatment reveal an asylum logic crossed by structural and institutionalized racism. By articulating medical discourses with the racist ideology of Brazilian social formation, the text discusses how madness was racialized, serving as a justification for hygienist, segregationist, and genocidal practices. Theoretically, we used the works of Amarante (1998), Arbex (2013), Basaglia (1968; 1987; 2011), Bento (2022), Davis (2018), Fanon (2008; 2022), Foucault (2014), Goffman (1961), Grosfoguel; Bernardino-Costa; Maldonado-Torres (2018), Laing (1968; 2010), Mbembe (2018), Pinel (1809), Ribeiro (2017), Scheper-Hughes (undated), Silveira (1981; 2001), Szasz (1970; 1970; 1994), among others. Methodologically, it is a qualitative research based on Minayo (2007), descriptive and bibliographic according to Gil (2008), where a comprehensive analysis was carried out based on Weber (1949). The research showed that Brazilian psychiatry has historically served as a mechanism of social exclusion, especially racial exclusion. Barbacena's case reveals how asylum practices have been aligned with racist and hygienist ideologies. Madness was used as a justification to neutralize bodies that deviated from the white and bourgeois norm. Institutional silence and historical erasure reinforce necropolitics applied to the undesirables. There is an urgency to rethink policies of care and historical reparation.