When the judiciary is the back up: the psychiatric hospitalization at issue

Abstract

Abstract Faced with the precariousness of social policies, which impacts the conditions of the family to exercise its protective function, the judicialization of mental health demands becomes one of the mechanisms used to guarantee rights. In view of this, we aimed to discuss the sharing of responsibilities between the family of the subject in psychological distress and the State, based on the demands of compulsory internment that reach the Brazilian judiciary. This is a documental research in which 23 judgments were analyzed, which were processed between 2001 and 2017, in the second instance of the Paraná State Court of Justice. As results, we highlight that by individualizing and reducing collective demands, the judiciary configures itself as a functional apparatus to the capital in crisis, based on the discourse of legal equality. The primacy of the individual is also evident in the few mentions of families, taken as informants of the condition of the user, their inclusion in the service offered by the network is superficial.