Asylum for People with Disabilities

Care for people with disabilities is based on a charity-custodial model. This situation arose from public health and rehabilitation policies, which favoured the transfer of resources to the community, keeping care under the aegis of religious humanitarianism. Asylums in their various forms are marginalised from scientific institutions, such as first-line hospitals and rehabilitation centres. These nursing homes provide shelter and basic care for their clients in a very precarious way, worsening the condition of the people interned there and breaking family and social ties once and for all. By characterising a typical hospital institution and analysing interviews with an institutionalised subject using a psychoanalytical framework, the aim was to understand the impact of asylum on the process of constituting subjectivity and the mechanisms that sustain the practice of asylum. The hospital-asylum emerges as an invisible support for the modern institution of rehabilitation.