In search of lost places: life stories of the mentally ill

The aim of this study is to get to know the life stories of mentally ill people; to recover their expectations, projects and possibilities inside or outside psychiatric institutions; and to reflect, based on the subjects’ life experiences, on the care provided to mentally ill people in our country. The life stories were collected through individual interviews and participant observation. In the process of analysis, I first sought to situate the subjects in the line of temporality. This led to the oppositions that demarcated the temporal trait: ＂BEFORE＂ versus ＂AFTER＂ the process of becoming ill, through which the stories were reordered. Going through the movement of identity in temporality, we then established the spatial trait or the anchoring of the character in the BEFORE, NOW and AFTER the madness. The subjects not only described, but also evaluated their temporal and spatial existence. This procedure revealed two movements on the part of the subjects, one that showed them constructing themselves in their social roles and another that gave the qualitative dimension of this performance.