This article focuses on the knowledge and practice involved in mental health issues connected to the so-called crisis. Resulting from experiences at the Instituto Municipal de Assistência à Saúde Nise da Silveira (IMAS), a county center for health care in Rio de Janeiro, this work was also developed by interviews with health professionals working at IMAS and one member of the Movimento da Luta Antimanicomial, a group that fights against the idea of psychological treatments in mental hospitals. Besides that, the literature about the Psychiatric Reform and about the topic of crisis was reviewed. Based on the data thus collected, this article points out the importance of the attention to the crisis as a means to instruct mental health practices and the production of subjectivities. Two central aspects are unfolded: 1) the turning of the human life troubles and pains, and subsequent behavioral problems, into institutionalized pathologies, as well as the acceptance as natural of the act of resorting to mental health services as a customary response; and 2) the proposal of the Italian Psychiatric Reform, according to which crisis is a word that can only define something related to the existing mechanisms of care giving. This approach made it possible to discuss the concept of crisis and the ways in which it interferes with the mental health services, both in the point of view of the professionals interviewed and in the practical issues of the services considered in this article.