Our thesis aims to present the path taken by the mentally ill since its emergence from the madness medicalization until the beginning of denial processes of the psychiatric institution in order to demonstrate their role as active political subject, as protagonist of the fight, and as a taxable person, victim of social segregation, political and economic exclusion and abandonment, due to continuous persecution of deviant from the norm and never actually due to their condition of suffering. Since its conception, modern psychiatry has come under severe criticism. The psychiatric paradigm, set of knowledge and practices relating to the study of mental illness as a scientific object, made on the grounds of modern rationality, was instituted as the dominant model during the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. It was from the isolation practices, consolidated by Philippe Pinel, who settled the necessary conditions for the founding of this specialty of medicine. Although psychiatry and the treatment of internal have undergone significant changes since then, it was in the 1970s that Franco Basaglia began a new trajectory, which attributed to the word reform a new meaning. From the experiences in the asylum of Gorizia, Basaglia built a basic theoretical and practical deconstruction of the psychiatric institution and deinstitutionalization, that was the basis for the start of psychiatric reform trajectory in Brazil, which was primarily on the strength of social movements that strengthened the country during the military regime.