Inhuman treatment

In the history of modern society, confinement is seen as a condemnatory measure to those who represent a threat to the imposed order: poor, foreign and sick, of any age and gender, marginalized and characterized as vagabonds, libertines, ragged, alienated, criminals, etc. These bodies were taken away from the streets and from social life, clustered in charitable, asylum and religious institutions, called the General Hospital.
It was in the 18^th century that the French doctor Philippe Pinel, then director of the General Hospital, identified the need to separate the “insane” from the others for specific medical treatment, thus emerging the classification of hospital wards, and also of “mental alienation ” as a medical category.
The psychiatric hospital created the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist, in turn, created mental illness. (Foucault, 1978)In Brazil, the first psychiatric institution was created by D. Pedro II, by Imperial Decree in 1841. The Hospício Pedro II, located in the Urca neighborhood, in Rio de Janeiro.

Other new treatments were electroconvulsive therapy, the insulin shock, and the cardeasol shock. I went to work in an infirmary, with an intelligent doctor, but who was adapted to those innovations. Then, he said to me:
-You are going to learn new treatment techniques. Let’s start with the electroshock.
We stopped in front of the bed of a patient who was there for electroshock. The psychiatrist pushed the button and the man convulsed. He then ordered that the patient be taken to the infirmary and asked for another one to be brought. When the new patient was ready for the shock to be delivered, the doctor told me:
-Press the button.
And I Answered:
I won’t press it!
But psychiatry had taken a turn and started overvaluing chemicals. Drugs were being administered in increasingly higher doses and for longer periods of time. I would not say that medication should not be used, of course, but the high doses and their prolonged use inhibit the creative activity of the individual, whether to paint, to work with wood, or to work in any other activity. Any creative work is inhibited if the individual is doped. The current psychiatry is dominated by chemotherapy, a real chemical straitjacket, while the old straitjacket was mechanical. 
Nise da Silveira

The bust, modeled thirty days after the lobotomy, retains good plastic qualities, but it is characterized by the lack of expression and the coarse finish. […] Unlike the works prior to the operation, these lack the emotional stress and the meticulous technical treatment. The first objective sought by the followers of lobotomy had been reached: to separate thought from its emotional echoes.
– Luiz Carlos Mello (2014)

Lima broke the docility-utility circle, imposing his subjectivity in an institution that was controlling and domineering towards of the insane, whose disciplinary power forced the making of the kind of man needed for its functioning.
– Luciana Hidalgo (2003)

We are stripped of the clothes we are wearing and given others that can only cover our nudity, and not even slippers or clogs are given to us. The other time I was there, they gave me this piece of clothing that is very dear to me today. Not this time […]. They gave me a mug of yerba mate iced tea and then, still during the day, they threw me on a straw mattress with a cheap blanket, familiar to those who have lived in poverty and misery. 
– Lima Barreto (1919-1920)

I don’t mind the Asylum that much, but what bothers me is the police meddling in my affairs. In my own opinion, I’m sure I’m not crazy; but due to alcohol, mixed with all kinds of apprehensions that the hardships of my material life have imposed on me for six years, now and then, I show signs of madness: I rave.
– Lima Barreto (1919-1920)

What about madness? Plunged in the midst of almost two dozen madmen, there is absolutely no overall impression of it. There are, as in all manifestations of nature, individuals, individual cases, but a very strong family relationship among them does not exist or is not perceived. There are no species, there are no races of madmen; there are only madmen.
– Lima Barreto (1919-20)

Read Cemitério dos vivos (The Graveyard of the Living). On these pages, I tell, in detail, the most playful and painful scenes that take place inside these impregnable walls. I have seen very interesting things. Now, all that is left is to write, put all the gathered observations into shape. This work I intend to start as soon as I leave, because, here, I do not have the amenities that are desired for the making of a work of this nature.
– Lima Barreto (1919-1920)

The police, I do not know how and why, is now obsessed with the most childish of generalizations. They are suspicious of any foreign guy with a complicated name… every citizen of color must be a scoundrel; and all the insane must be furious and can only be transported in armored vehicles. The super-sharp policemen should realize that there are as many forms of madness as there are of temperaments among the so-called sane people, and the furious ones are the exception.
– Lima Barreto (1919-1920)