Voces y trayectorias
Conversations on Psychiatric Deinstitutionalisation
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.
Voces y Trayectorias: Conversations on Psychiatric Deinstitutionalisation – Episode 1
This conversation features Dr Benedetto Saraceno, former Director of the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse at the WHO, psychiatrist, and longstanding advocate of community-based mental health care.
Interviewers: Delia Da Mosto & Felipe Szabzon
Voces y Trayectorias: Conversations on Psychiatric Deinstitutionalisation – Episode 2
A conversation with Dr Marcelo Kimati, Director of Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drugs at Brazil’s Ministry of Health, on the challenges and future of Brazil’s psychiatric reform and community-based care.
Interviewers: Cristian Montenegro & Felipe Szabzon
Voces y Trayectorias: Conversations on Psychiatric Deinstitutionalisation – Episode 3
In this session, we speak with Dr Mauricio Gómez Chamorro and Dr Sebastián Prieto, two leading figures in the development and implementation of psychiatric reform in Chile. The conversation explores the historical trajectory of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation, the transformation of institutional care, the expansion of community-based mental health services, and the political and ethical challenges facing reform today.
Interviewers: Sofía Bowen & Cristian Montenegro
About the series
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.