“Será que esse é o nosso destino?" : história da implantação do Serviço de Aconselhamento Psicológico na Faculdade de Medicina da UFMG

Abstract

Based on the process of implementing the Psychological Counseling Service at the Faculty of Medicine of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (SAP-FM), this study aims to analyze the culture of the UFMG Medicine School (FM), especially with regard to the practices and modes of mental health care at the institution. At the beginning of 2023, at the request of certain university entities, the UFMG Psychological Duty service (which takes place at the UFMG Pampulha Campus) expanded to provide services in the FM building (located at the Health Campus). The implementation of the service triggered a series of institutional processes, whether for political negotiation between the school’s entities, understanding how the service would work and for whom it would serve, how it would position itself during the mental health care system already in place, etc. With this in mind, we rely on the understanding of Clinical Cartography (CC), as an attitude of the researcher-clinician who, faced with his or her insertion into an institutional context, seeks to understand its culture in a unique way, in order to create and make more flexible modes of clinical action peculiar to that context. Even the choice of the name “Psychological Counseling”, instead of “Psychological Duty”, is the result of this unique approach. Therefore, we also used ethnography to describe, through hermeneutic phenomenology, what happened in the process of creating and implementing SAP-FM. In this way, a narrative was written, telling the story and analyzing the process of setting up the service. The narrative follows the period of creation and implementation of the SAP-FM, focusing on what happened in 2023, between the first contacts with FM entities and the beginning of the service’s action. Throughout this process, we came across three main axes of analysis: 1) how hierarchical relations take place in the institution; 2) the modes of spatialization in the FM and the Health Campus; and 3) the articulation of regional medical ontology in the understanding of Mental Health in FM. We understand that the implementation of the SAP-FM articulates various cultural movements, the description of which proved relevant to understanding the institutional demand and the consequent implementation of a service suited to the institutional reality, SAP-FM.