[The search for lost places. Help for the mental patient made possible through his life history]. / Em busca de lugares perdidos: assistência ao doente mental revelada através de histórias de vida.

This study aims at knowing mental patients life history by freeing their hopes, projects and possibilities either indoors or away from the psychiatric institution and based on the people knowledge of life, pondering over assistance to mental patients. By reading speeches reports, we have been revealed their quality of life BEFORE, DURING and AFTER the maddening process, considering that for AFTER, the reports presented another meaning, even when the place was materially the same place of before becoming ill. Due to the lack of choice and of meaning, they succeeded in living looking backwards to the past, which, in most cases, was also plenty of difficulties; however they had the essential: the role they played was socially accepted, they shared the social group and anticipated the time-to-come. The subject of this study exposed the use of astuteness and smartness to dribble the rules to which they are submitted. They reinvindicate the liberation of the identity, the relational, they wish to share life with the others and participate in the administration of their destiny, somehow. They also state that the non-place, is not only the psychiatric hospital but also the existing culture of mad-houses in the families, out-patient units, daily hospitals and hospital psychiatric wards. Undoing the mad-house, it will be necessary to revise culture or mental mad-house, in other words, to free our minds from rationality of jail. This is not only a process within Psychiatry; it crosses different dimensions: politics, law, social organizations, rules, disciplinary institutions, the collective imaginary.