Vozes da pandemia da COVID-19: o que aprendemos sobre a nossa saúde mental?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought global challenges to all human beings, but especially to health professionals who work on the front line of patient care. Faced with so many challenges such as fear, uncertainty, severity and continuous change, the mental health of these professionals has never been so threatened. The impacts and consequences for them are unclear. In this context, my overall objective in this study was to analyze how working on the front line during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the mental health of health professionals and what coping strategies they have used. Methodologically, it is a case study, with a qualitative approach, with the purpose of: describing a certain reality, being able to establish correlations between the various dimensions; verifying the perception of the mental health of health professionals who worked on the front line of COVID-19; and identifying symptoms that triggered changes in the emotional states of these workers. The project was approved by COEP - UFMG, respecting all ethical aspects in research with human beings. To this end, I carried out 11 open-ended interviews with a static visual resource with the health workers who make up the multi-professional team, nurses, nursing technicians, physiotherapists and doctors who worked on the front line of COVID-19. The technique adopted for processing the data obtained was French Discourse Analysis. They said that fear, contamination, caring for the family reverberated in stress, anguish, loneliness, exhaustion, sadness, feelings that caused changes in sleep; addictions; crying and coping such as: practice of regular physical activity, use of medication, use of music as a therapeutic resource, professional help from both psychiatrists and psychotherapists, all of this to maintain their mission of working on the care and recovery of patients' health and "getting the job done", a central discourse based on biopower, organized by biopolitics and governmentality according to Foucault, seeking through a system of normalizations surveillance (panopticon), discipline and productivity. To compose the technical product of this dissertation, at the end of the interview, I asked about mindfulness practices, which is a type of self-care, based on Foucault, and invited them to try a technique and report how they felt at the end of it. All the interviewees shared the experience positively, demonstrating the importance of more teaching about this practice and reinforcing the need to continue developing attention in self-care. The technical product resulting from this research was the development of an introductory online course presenting mindfulness techniques capable of benefiting the self-care and mental health of health professionals.