Voces y trayectorias

About the Series

Voces y trayectorias: Conversations on Psychiatric Deinstitutionalisation is an online series of public dialogues with people who have played a meaningful role in shaping, implementing, or reflecting on processes of psychiatric reform and deinstitutionalisation. The series focuses on Latin America—particularly Brazil and Chile—while opening a space for comparative and transnational reflection.

Hosted under the Transitions Project (Wellcome Trust, King’s College London), and organised in collaboration with the Instituto de Medicina Social, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, and the Escuela de Salud Pública, Universidad de Chile, Voces y trayectorias offers a forum to listen to, document, and connect diverse perspectives on reform—linking lived experience, activism, policy, and research.

Each session brings together voices from different generations and roles—former policymakers, practitioners, researchers, activists, and people with lived experience—to discuss the motivations, struggles, and transformations that have shaped the field of mental health care. Conversations explore both the personal and collective dimensions of change: how people imagine, build, and sustain alternatives to institutional psychiatry.

The series contributes to the renewed global debate on psychiatric deinstitutionalisation by advancing three key perspectives central to the Transitions project:

• A historical lens, connecting past experiences and present challenges in mental health reform.

• Perspectives from the Global South, highlighting locally grounded approaches and their wider resonances.

• Insights from the social sciences, expanding how mental health systems, care, and change are understood.

In addition, Voces y trayectorias aims to create an open-access audiovisual archive—a multilingual record of conversations capturing the diversity of experiences, contexts, and forms of knowledge that have shaped psychiatric reform. This archive will be made available through the Transitions website as a resource for researchers, students, policymakers, and communities engaged in rethinking mental health care.

Confirmed Sessions

27 Nov 2025:

• Benedetto Saraceno, Former Director, Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, WHO. Link to register

3 Dec 2025:

• Marcelo Kimati Dias, Department of Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drugs, Ministry of Health, Brazil. Link to register

Jan 2026

• Javiera Erazo, Department of Mental Health, Ministry of Health, Chile
• Sebastián Prieto, Coquimbo Health Service, Chile

Mar 2026

• Lorena Berríos, ⁠Redesfera Latinoamericana por las Culturas Locas, la Diversidad Psicosocial, la Justicia, el Buen Vivir y el Derecho al Delirio
• Dariel Jara, Movimiento en Defensa de Nuestra Salud Mental

Further guests will be announced soon.

All sessions will be held online via Zoom and livestreamed on YouTube, with recordings and transcripts available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Hosted by:

Cristian Montenegro, Sofía Bowen, Felipe Szabzon, and Delia Da Mosto (Transitions Project)