Julio Cesar Villa Palomino

Since 2016, Peru has been deinstitutionalizing care for people with severe psychiatric disorders. The country is transitioning from a model based in asylums and psychiatric hospitals towards a Community Mental Health Model to be implemented nationwide by 2023. Every asylum and psychiatric hospital is now mandated to have a deinstitutionalization committee that traces family members in order to permanently relocate institutionalized clients in their home community. Deinstitutionalization is recruiting and mobilizing a variety of individuals: from neighbors, to psychiatrists and social workers, and even the police. My project asks how deinstitutionalization affects the daily lives of residents in the hosting community of Carabayllo, an impoverished district in the outskirts of Lima, where the first Community Mental Health Center was launched in 2016. My project will contribute to the theorization of surveillance as care, and the transformation of the boundaries between clinic and community. I will ethnographically examine: 1) how Carabayllo residents are recruited into and enact the project of deinstitutionalization, 2) how practices of surveillance and reportage mobilized for the care of the mentally ill are incorporated under the notion of community care, and 3) how the boundaries between clinic and community are reshaped by the ongoing process of deinstitutionalization.