Experiências autonomistas em saúde mental: possibilidades de empoderamento

Abstract

Autonomy and empowerment are radical principles and goals in Psychosocial Care. They are polysemic concepts and appear in the literature of the field of Psychosocial Attention independently and often as synonyms. The conception of autonomy, inspired by the construction of Castoriadis, dialogues with the notion of empowerment proposed by Eduardo Mourão Vasconcelos, through reflexivity and participation proper to emancipatory political processes. This is a qualitative study, in the form of an intervention research, guided by the French Institutional Analysis (AI) framework, which advocates a new way of thinking and exercising science by understanding that research and intervention take place together, as well as the production of the object and subject of knowledge, valuing everything that stems from the researcher's position in social relations and in the institutional network. The objective ofthis research was to study the process of constructing autonomist experiences in the field of mental health, analyzing the possibilities and the challenges of the real production of autonomy and empowerment in a radio workshop that produces the program " Crazy Tuning" and in the group of theater " Research and Creation Center Frogs and Drowners". Research methods and techniques involved the conceptual and analytical tools and devices of the Institutional Analysis, such as analyzers, analysis of implication and overimplication and restitution, as well as participant observation, interview, documentary research, and records in the field notebook of the researcher. The development of the research process led to the construction of the Crazy Tuning radio program for dialogue with the conception of empowerment, which highlighted three strategies of empowerment: the fight against stigma,personal narratives of life with mental disorder and militancy. In addition to the empowerment potential, the experience has produced analyzing and instituting effects on the academic formation in mental health. The autonomous characteristic of Frogs and Drowners and the nature of its creative process was what made possible the dialogue with Castoriadis in the second phase of the study. This autonomist praxis, because essentially creative, confers appointment and a new social place that confronts the social stigma related to madness, besides reverting to social support, affection and solidarity.