The social action of the psychiatrist (1943)

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgments

The translation of this paper from Portuguese to English was generously funded by Clínica Jorge Jaber.

Information on original publications and biographic notes about the authors

By Ana Maria G. R. Oda: Professor of the Department of Medical Psychology and Psychiatry, State University of Campinas, Brazil. Editor of the section ‘História da Psiquiatria’ [History of Psychiatry] of Revista Latinoamericana de Psicopatologia Fundamental.

Original publication: Pernambucano, Ulysses. ‘A ação social do Psiquiatra’ (1943) Neurobiologia, vol. 6, n. 4, p. 153–160. (Opening address of the III Congress of the Society of Neurology, Psychiatry and Mental Hygiene of the Northeast, Natal, 1943). Translation by American Journal Experts, technical revision by Ana Maria G. R. Oda. The text was republished in 2005 in the Revista Latinoamericana de Psicopatologia Fundamental, vol. 8, n. 1, p. 130–136, preceded by an introductory article.

Ulysses Pernambucano de Mello Sobrinho (1892–1943) received a medical degree in Rio de Janeiro in 1912 and completed his psychiatric training at the National Hospital for the Insane (Hospital Nacional de Alienados) in the same city. He then returned to his home state of Pernambuco, in northeastern Brazil, an area with little economic development and a very poor population. He developed and conducted important and original work in the state capital in the fields of psychiatric care, research, and education. He also worked in the fields of pedagogy and child psychology. Pernambucano considered social, economic, and cultural factors to be the primary determinants of mental illness, in addition to the health conditions associated with poverty, particularly syphilis, alcohol abuse, and childhood malnutrition. This work gave rise to his conception of ‘mental hygiene.’ He served as director of the Tamarineira Hospital (Hospital da Tamarineira), a large state psychiatric hospital, in which he implemented reforms to improve the quality of life for his patients. In 1931, he conceived a plan for a government initiative that included the creation of services to provide psychiatric care to acute patients, an outpatient clinic, agricultural colonies for chronic patients, a mental hospital for the criminally insane, and even the establishment of an office for statistics on mental illnesses. In 1935, he was arrested on charges of ‘communism,’ forced to retire, and barred from public service. In 1938, he was one of the founders of the journal Neurobiologia and the Society of Neurology, Psychiatry, and Mental Hygiene of the Brazilian Northeast, an interdisciplinary scientific society that drew together different professions. The lecture ‘The social action of the psychiatrist’ (1943) synthesizes Ulysses Pernambucano’s scientific, ethical, and political positions under circumstances in which civil and human rights were under threat from the authoritarian government of President Getúlio Vargas’s “New State” (1937–1945).