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The use of crack cocaine has given rise to an intense discussion in society. Research has contributed to the characterization of users and the negative consequences of its use. However, few studies have conducted in-depth study of the social and cultural contexts in which crack cocaine is used. Thus, this study seeks to discuss the ritual of crack cocaine use and its social and health consequences for the user. It is a qualitative study developed in the Psychosocial Care Centers for Alcohol and Drugs (Portuguese acronym: Caps-ad). The individuals were selected in two groups of key-informants: crack cocaine users undergoing treatment and health professionals. Data was obtained by means of semi-structured interviews. The results revealed that the use of crack cocaine is not dissociated with the current organizational structure of society. There is a link between the use of this substance and the social organization for its use. By using crack cocaine, the individuals try to be part of a consumer market, actively participating in what society perceives as new. The forms and locations of use are directly related to users' health, making it necessary for healthcare services to detect, approach and make health interventions in these locations of use.

After presenting the ideas on madness and its interface with art as expressed in the writings of Michel Foucault, Peter Pál Pelbart, and Gilles Deleuze, the article explores how these authors question the relationship between art and madness. It begins with the notion that madness does not tell the truth about art, and vice versa, but that there are links between both that must be delved into if we are to engage in deeper reflection on the topic. The text problematizes the statement that madness is the absence of an oeuvre and examines how this impacts the possibility of achieving an artistic oeuvre. It further problematizes the idea of madness as excluded language, that is, the idea that madness implies not only the exclusion of the body but also the disqualification of discourse.

This article deals with interdisciplinarity as well as psychiatric and psychosocial care. Throughout the text, a historical account of the constitution and the crisis of scientific knowledge is presented and organized into disciplines. The theoretical difficulty of conceptualizing interdisciplinarity is analyzed and, in the concluding remarks, psychiatry and its relationship to psychosocial care is discussed. The argument is that, because of its history, psychiatry has singularities that differentiate it from other medical specialties and these singularities could initially cause psychiatry to go in the opposite direction in relation to interdisciplinarity. The conclusion is that because of their inherent characteristics psychosocial care services are privileged places for psychiatric training with interdisciplinary characteristics.

Since the seventies Brazil has witnessed a diversity of new proposals in the field of mental health care. Since then, the psychology and psychiatry ambulatories, day-hospitals, therapeutical shelters and psychosocial care centers have multiplied. Transformed into a public policy, the psychosocial care centers are spread all over the country, offering outpatient care with interdisciplinary and territorial orientation. Generally established under the auspices of a great hospital, the psychiatrist who considers working from a psychosocial perspective in a small city, has to deal with the classic contradictions of the psychiatric discourse. The varied local knowledge seems to threat the psychiatric knowledge. Answers, easy to be given in the hospital, have different implications in the field and acquire a complexity for which the psychiatrist is not prepared. Thus, this work tries to demonstrate the differences between these two kinds of psychiatry: the classic one (concerned with biology and the institution) and the psychosocial one (seeking for locally constructed answers and concerned with the human being in a dimension reaching far beyond the body).