Psicologia e humanitarismo : um estudo sobre as políticas de intervenção no campo do refúgio

Abstract

Humanitarianism is characterized by the provision of assistance to populations facing life-threatening crisis situations, engaged in bringing aid to different parts of the world. One of the axes of the work is aimed at people on the move – refugees, migrants, internally displaced people. A field composed of a transnational axis that establishes international policies and crisis management protocols, establishing the foundations of the humanitarian system, migration policies and the institute of refuge; by the policies adopted by the States that demarcate the legal contours of migratory movements and the institutional responses offered; for the work of organizations, professionals and volunteers who implement actions aimed at refugees and migrants. Such actions are distributed among reception and integration practices in the receiving countries, they occur in refugee camps and border areas, as well as during the crossing with rescue, generally carried out by NGOs, framed in a global governance system. Psychology enters this scenario from the incorporation of the mental health axis in the work of organizations. But this action goes beyond the provision of psychological care, as this investigation proposes to show. The research, qualitative and exploratory, aimed to analyze the ways of approaching psychology in the humanitarian field of refuge, seeking to access the elaborations about the suffering and condition of refugees who operate in this field, the designs of interventions aimed at refugee people, and, from there, to understand how psy productions enter humanitarian policies and establish a place for the migrant and refugee subject. Field research was carried out in Portugal and Brazil, also comprising dialogue with actors operating without borders in different countries. 24 interviews were carried out, in an open and dialogic way, with people who work in the humanitarian field of refuge and migration and crisis situations. The topics covered are distributed in the following axes of analysis: processes of recognition of the status of refuge and other migratory modalities; migration and humanitarian policies; care and assistance practices for migrants and refugees; mental health and suffering; contours of psychological intervention; political participation. Some ambivalences are expressed in the understanding of the refugee condition, in the possible effects of the intervention, on the role of Psychology. This is consolidated as an expertise that builds a field of rationality that produces the subject it deals with, the psychological subject, participates in the mobilization of sensitivities that emphasizes suffering, acts in the construction of rights and victims, and sediments the mental health as one of the nodal axes of intervention and constitution of humanitarian and global governance policies.