UHSA : une nouvelle logique de l’espace de soin au milieu du carcéral ?

Abstract

Unités hospitalières spécialement aménagées (UHSA) are recent French structures offering psychiatric care to incarcerated persons. UHSA are part of a broader history and context of the interweaving of care and justice. This article proposes a contextual reading of the care processes within the UHSA in which we work. By following a spatio-temporal axis, we have avenues for reading the experience and psychopathological expression of the disorders of incarcerated people. The crushing of space and time seems to us particularly prevalent in the prison environment and sometimes requires other solutions. Hospitalization in a UHSA is now one of them, and some patients return here regularly. UHSA, in terms of space, time and relationships, takes charge of patients and accompanies them in a different way from the prison world. By starting from the ways of entry into care, with or without consent, we can read the ways of being hospitalized and of appropriating care. Our hypothesis is that this place allows an exit or an additional confinement in the hospital environment.