LETRAMENTO & ALFABETIZAÇÃO COM MORADORES DE UM HOSPITAL PSIQUIÁTRICO: A ESCRITA COMO RESGATE DA SUBJETIVIDADE

This work intends to report an experience with reading and writing practices within a group of about ten chronic (male and female, aging between 39 and 68), resident-users of a mental health service in a city in São Paulo State, Brazil. All of them had previously been in-patients in a mental home hospital and were diagnosed as having different psychiatric diseases. Due both to the long term admission in a mental home, - a time during which they were abandoned to themselves - and to theadministration of drugs, their illness became chronic and their motor and cognitive functions became damaged. When this work started, these patients’ routine within the hospital did not include any reading/writing activities, and this fact had the effect of creating a radical splitting between them and the “world outside” (where literate practices are widely and extensively used within everybody’s daily routine tasks). Thislack was so marked, that some of our subjects had forgotten they knew how to read and write. We started a programmed work with literacy whose main objective was to open a space for these patients wherein they could (re)take the literate discursive practices they once knew and used. The method used was based in the socio-historical approach to literacy, which conceives reading and writing as discursive activities which only make sense when they are embedded in social practices. Also, since what is written is supposed always to be read by the other(s), literacy is also conceived as an intersubjective activity. This work lasted 6 months, with two 1 hour sessions per week.When we left the hospital, the patients had a different attitude towards writing: they became aware, first, that they could use it as a bridge between them and distant people; second, that it could be used to help them organize their daily routine within the hospital, and finally, that it permitted them to talk about their personal feelings