Deficiência, gênero, cuidado e interdependência: Relato de experiência com mães de pessoas com deficiência intelectual

Abstract

The present work brings a descriptive and field research resulting from the experience built in the Mandatory Curricular Internship in Psychology, at the Fundação Centro Integrado de Apoio ao Portador de Deficiência (FUNAD). The research aimed to understand the context (gender and care relations, the overload resulting from the role of caregiver, socioeconomic conditions, experiences of capacitism in different spaces, among other emerging themes) of family members of people with intellectual disabilities. To this end, after approval of the protocol by the Research Ethics Committee of the Health Sciences Center of the UFPB, under CAEE: 63116022.9.0000.5188, we started the practices divided into two moments: listening to those responsible for the users (as), and the Creativity Workshops. We used a sociodemographic questionnaire to listen to the 27 interviewed families. The collected data guided the formulation of the Creativity Workshops as a tool for dialogue, reception and exchange of experiences, which we held 24 Creativity Workshops (10 on Monday, 8 on Wednesday and 6 on Friday) covering 3 groups other than mothers, with an average duration of 1 hour. The relationship between gender and care could be glimpsed in the process of listening to the families and in the Workshops through an exclusive audience of female caregivers. Reports emerged of empowering experiences, the overload of the role of caregiver, blaming the condition of a person with an intellectual disability on the part of family members, and others. It is concluded that such women demand a look at their situation of overload and invisibility, raising the urgency of formulating interventions that welcome their narratives, enable the protagonism of such a group, and above all, problematize the naturalization of the social role of women as caregivers.