[Mental health nursing work: contradictions and current potentialities].

This study aimed to identify contradictions and challenges that are present nowadays in mental health nursing work, in the context of the Psychiatric Reform, on the basis of the historical-social construction of this working process. The Psychiatric Reform presupposes a new design of work purpose and instruments, which still have little visibility in nursing practice, and the possibility for the person in mental suffering to achieve the subject-citizen condition - way of being and work purpose - which is directly related with the subject-citizen awareness of the nursing worker.