On 13 July 2026, the Transitions project brought together researchers, collaborators and colleagues at King’s College London for Psychiatric Deinstitutionalisation in Latin America: Movement, Memory and Circulation, a symposium exploring the histories and trajectories of psychiatric reform across Latin America.
Marking the completion of the first year of Transitions, the symposium provided an opportunity to share emerging research from the project and to discuss how our initial questions and assumptions have evolved through historical research, fieldwork and collaboration across Brazil, Chile and Europe.
Transitions Symposium | Psychiatric Deinstitutionalisation in Latin America
Video credit: Egemen Dogan, https://www.sogoodmedia.uk
One year of Transitions
Transitions is a historical and comparative study of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation in South America. Rather than approaching deinstitutionalisation primarily as a technical process of closing psychiatric hospitals and developing community services, the project examines the wider political, intellectual and institutional processes through which ideas about reform, care and community have emerged, travelled, been contested and transformed.
A central question motivating the project has concerned the geography of knowledge about psychiatric reform. Conventional histories can reproduce a familiar movement from centres of innovation towards sites of implementation: models are developed in one place and subsequently transferred or adapted elsewhere. South American histories complicate this picture.
The region has long histories of debate in psychiatry, social medicine and public health; influential social and professional movements; ambitious experiments in institutional transformation; and sustained debates about the meanings of care, community, rights and citizenship.
During its first year, Transitions has increasingly moved away from searching for a distinctive ‘Latin American model’ of psychiatric reform. Instead, our work is reconstructing the different historical trajectories through which reform became possible, examining both their specificity and the encounters and circulations connecting them.
National trajectories of psychiatric reform
The first panel, chaired by Francisco Ortega (ICREA / Universitat Rovira i Virgili), explored the distinctive historical trajectories of psychiatric reform in Brazil and Chile.
Felipe Szabzon (Institute of Social Medicine, UERJ / Transitions) presented ‘Beyond Rupture: Continuities, Frictions and Synergies in the Making of the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform’. His paper reconsidered histories that portray Brazilian psychiatric reform primarily through moments of rupture, drawing attention instead to continuities, tensions and earlier intellectual and institutional developments that complicate established accounts of the reform movement.
Sofía Bowen (Universidad de Chile / Transitions) presented ‘Deinstitutionalisation from the Outside In: Social Medicine, Democracy, and Community Mental Health in Chile’. Her paper situated the development of community mental health within Chile’s longer traditions of social medicine and public health, examining how psychiatric reform became entangled with democratic transition and wider processes of institutional and political transformation.
Together, the papers demonstrated why national histories matter - not as self-contained cases, but as different configurations of political change, intellectual traditions, institutions and social movements through which psychiatric reform became imaginable.
Reform across borders
The second panel, chaired by Dominique Béhague (Vanderbilt University), moved beyond national trajectories to consider the movement of ideas between countries and their subsequent reconfiguration within regional and global frameworks.
Delia Da Mosto (King’s College London / Transitions) presented ‘Contesting Epistemic Encounters: Italy, Brazil and the Global Assembling of Psychiatric Deinstitutionalisation’. Drawing on the encounters connecting Italian and Brazilian psychiatric reform, her paper examined circulation not as a straightforward process of diffusion, but as one of translation, contestation and reciprocal transformation involving professionals, activists, users and institutions.
Cristian Montenegro (King’s College London / Transitions) presented ‘From Experiment to Consensus: Policy, Memory and the Distributed Genealogy of Global Mental Health’. The paper traced connections between earlier experiments in community mental health, their regional codification in Latin America and the later emergence of ideas now associated with Global Mental Health. It proposed a ‘distributed genealogy’ in which innovations emerging across different settings became progressively transformed into portable models, often becoming detached from the histories and political struggles through which they had originally developed.
Images, memory and psychiatric reform
Alongside the presentations, the symposium included a small curated photographic exhibition drawing on visual materials connected to the project’s research.
The exhibition brought questions of memory and representation directly into the symposium space. Images related to psychiatric institutions, reform movements, activism and public life provided another way of engaging with the histories under discussion and became a point of conversation between participants during breaks and the reception.
Continuing the conversation
Both panels were followed by extended discussion with participants attending in London and online. Rather than presenting completed findings, the symposium was deliberately organised around work in development, creating an opportunity for questions, comparison and critical feedback to inform the next stages of the research.
The symposium also opened a wider week of Transitions activities in London. Several of the questions raised during the afternoon - about historical memory, community, the circulation of knowledge, and the relationship between local experimentation and international models - were carried into subsequent conversations with members of the project’s International Advisory Board and a two-day workshop bringing the research team into dialogue with practitioners and other collaborators.
Psychiatric Deinstitutionalisation in Latin America: Movement, Memory and Circulation was organised by Transitions: The Ethics and Politics of Psychiatric Deinstitutionalisation in South America, a Wellcome-funded project hosted by the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London.