Currículo terapêutico e lazer: pedagogias do cuidado e dispositivos de subjetivação no tratamento da dependência de drogas

Abstract

Therapeutic communities are informal educational settings dedicated to treating people with drug abuse. In recent years, the services offered by these institutions have expanded and been progressively incorporated into Brazilian public policies addressing this issue. Despite the numerous criticisms leveled against them for adopting care models based on the abstinence paradigm (Quintas; Tavares, 2020), these institutions can nonetheless serve as educational settings of hope for drug addicts and their families, constituting "ways to avoid a worse evil" (Machado, 2023), producing alternatives to mass incarceration and death. Among the various activities mobilized in therapeutic treatment programs, leisure stands out as an indispensable dimension in the processes of prevention, reeducation, and social reintegration of patients. Therefore, by considering the interactions between curriculum, leisure, and professional practice in therapeutic communities, this study aimed to analyze the policies and pedagogies that constitute the leisure-based curriculum at a therapeutic center focused on the treatment of chemical dependency, located in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. The research adopts a qualitative approach, involving a literature review on the topic and documentary analysis of legal provisions and institutional sources that guide the work within the institution. Furthermore, it uses the ethnographic method, with participant observation and semi-structured interviews with professionals. Anchored in the paradigm of prohibition and total abstinence from drugs, the therapeutic center advocates for the complete cessation ofpatients from the use of these substances, operating under the guidance of knowledge and professions ranging from religious to scientific. In this sense, the institution reproduces interests inherent in the guiding documents of Public Drug Policies in the national context. Grounded in Christian spiritualism, which manifests itself through its institutional website,professionals, routines, informal conversations, and leisure activities, the organization invests in a movement of subjective moral conversion. Within its territory, the drug problem is portrayed as a path of no return and a factor in the deterioration of physical and mental health, affecting life as a whole. This understanding reveals three central aspects: the predominance of moralistic discourses on drug use in the institutional therapeutic curriculum; the investment in the internalization of prohibitionism in the consciousness of patients and their families; and the dilution of pedagogies of care and devices of subjectivation in playful and leisure activities.