[Psychiatric institution, medical ideology and the chronification of disease].

The author examines some aspects of the history of psychiatry in order to show that psychiatry follows the path traced by the ideology of medicine. The psychiatric hospital was, and continues to be, the place in which psychic suffering is transformed into an "organic" disease; and where the symptom-alteration of behaviour, is still referred to as a "lesion", even though, after one and a half century of research, this idea has not yet been proved. Today, as yesterday, the term "endogenous" is correctly used to indicate major mental diseases; this is a term indicating that we know nothing about the origin of these diseases. However, psychiatry behaves as though it knew. Psychiatrists formulate diagnoses, implement organic therapies, prescribe drugs and reconfirm a nosology which should be seriously reconsidered. In other words, psychiatry continues to be the field of ideological transformation, of the social into the biological, as well as the field of biological justification for mechanisms of social exclusion.