Medidas de segurança: a precaridade do tratamento oferecido pelo estado ao doente mental infrator e as consequências para a sociedade piauiense

Abstract

Security measures are a means used by the state to punish the mentally ill who have committed any offense. His first legal prediction in Brazil came with the promulgation of the Penal Code of 1940 and was intended to restrict the freedom of the offender mental patient to return to his normal state of sanity. However, this view of the Criminal Law on security measures has led to the internment of many people in Hospitals of Custody and Psychiatric Treatment with degrading structures and without applying an appropriate treatment for the pathology of their inmates. In an attempt to change this sad reality, the Law of Psychiatric Reform was promulgated in 2001, bringing the application of a more humane treatment to these detainees and the predilection of the treatment in a psychosocial network instead of the admission to a psychiatric hospital. In Piauí, for a long time the mentally ill offenders were housed at Valter Alencar Penitentiary Hospital, which functioned more as a human deposit than as a hospital. These inmates did not receive the necessary treatment and were housed in degrading places, which put their lives at even more risk. The solution found by the State of Piauí was the extinction of this establishment and the removal of detainees in compliance with security measures for the Hospital Areolino de Abreu or for the Therapeutic Residences. Despite adopting a measure that treats the mentally ill as a more humane treatment and which gradually seeks to conform to the Psychiatric Reform Act, there are still many problems to be solved by the State to turn that treatment into a model that is truly effective.