<p>The current political scenario presents itself in a challenging way to defend social rights, which warns us about the urgency of (re)evaluating the real achievements in particular, by the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform. Thus, the objective of this article is to analyze whether the psychiatric reform has altered the legal status of the person in mental distress, from being a coerced patient to a citizen with guaranteed rights under national legislation. For that, we carry out, from a qualitative approach, a longitudinal research of comparative-critical analysis of the last three national legislative texts that dealt with mental health assistance, since 1934 until the approval of the current law of Psychiatric Reform in 2001. The texts were subjected to content analysis based on three thematic groups: ways of referencing to people who use health care services; the types of psychiatric hospitalization planned; and guaranteeing the civil rights of these people. In the end, we built an analytical-comparative framework, which shows us the categories of analysis, the advances and setbacks of the current legislation.</p>