The duties of emancipation: Psychiatry and citizenship in late Francoist Spain

Abstract

This article tries to reconstruct and clarify some of the causes and consequences of the climate of emancipation that, as it happened in other areas of Spanish society, seized psychiatric discourses and practices in the final years of General Franco’s dictatorship. In this way, the crystallization of a new sensibility towards the situation of people affected by mental disorders, the increasing professional demands of participation and involvement in the management of institutions and the efforts to implement more horizontal therapeutic interventions are interpreted in the framework of the emergence of a more active, assertive and inclusive civic consciousness. Taking into account the severe restriction of political rights and the repressive measures with which the regime finally faced all this wave of psychiatric dissent, the paper offers a brief final reflection on the scarce compatibility of the culture of community mental health with authoritarian sociopolitical environments and on the inevitable disenchantment caused later by the effective implementation of the processes of deinstitutionalization and psychiatric reform.