“Até que um dia eu surtei”: um estudo antropológico sobre experiências de crise em saúde mental e itinerações de cuidado

Abstract

It is a qualitative research with an ethnographic theoretical-methodological approach, registered in the field of Medical Anthropology, which aims to understand the construction of meaning to the crisis in mental health and the experience of caring for suffering. The fieldwork was carried out through the collection of life narratives and in-depth interviews of three people living in the city of João Pessoa, PB, with trajectories of illness in the field of mental health. The idea of a crisis in mental health was used by the interlocutors to name a list of experiences that involved suffering that bordered on the unbearable, and related to moments that were mixed up with other biographical crises. It was identified in the process of illness and in the experience of suffering social crossings with issues of gender, race, sexuality, class and generation. The results also pointed to the development of strategies by the subjects to deal with suffering, reestablish satisfactory life conditions and prevent new crises, which dialogue with the biomedical and psychosocial care offered by mental health equipment, but also produce new forms of self-care. Through the itinerary in search of care and the articulation of the multiple actors, environments, objects and speeches that are part of it, the construction of meaning to the crisis proved to be anchored in the experience itself, which, although embodied and singular, shows results also with broader social logics, making possible a dialogue with sociopolitcal economic contexts and larger scale social crossings.