Em busca de uma sociologia da ansiedade: um estudo de comunidades virtuais de ajuda mútua durante a pandemia de COVID-19

Abstract

This thesis aims to comprehend the anxiety social causes and whether its experience reinforces or reproduces social inequalities, based on a qualitative analysis of a virtual mutual aid group - the online group “Caminho Novo” created through the Community of Neurotics Anonymous (N/A), which is voluntary fellowship formed by people who share their experiences to solve their common emotional problems. In the background, the narratives present on the North American website Therapy Tribe will be analyzed as a way of comparing and understanding this emotion in two different realities, but which were close in relation to the pandemic context. More specifically, it seeks to understand whether anxiety, as a situation of psychic suffering, is related to changes in the world of work and in affective and social relationships and also in the construction and self-perception of identity, and the social consequences of such an anxiety condition. The axis of the approach is the experiences lived by individuals in anxiogenic states reported on these virtual forums during the period of the pandemic from 2020 to 2021. The research results revealed a correlation between the experience of anxiety and situations of economic and social precariousness. The social structures involved in the experience of anxiety and which are expressed in social action, from this mediator, make the people who experience it unable to leave the immobilizing framework placed by this emotion, reinforcing the situation of economic and social vulnerability. Anxiety is experienced as an emotion that prevents members from entering the job market or remaining in it, it also makes it difficult to experience affective relationships and new bonds, leading respondents to situations of loneliness and, in some cases, divorce. Keywords: anxiety, inequality, psychic suffering.