Cuidado e racialização em um centro de atenção psicossocial infância-adolescência: uma análise da psicologia social construcionista

Abstract

This master's thesis is the result of a political stance that argues that the racial issue is an agenda that needs to be addressed in our society. Its starting point is my involvement with discussions about racism, whiteness and anti-racism, as well as my experience of dealing with these issues in the context of mental health, since the time I was a Resident in Mental Health. Constructionist social psychology served as a theoretical-methodological framework, outlining a type of social research based on the principle of dialogicality. We interviewed 17 professionals from a Child-Adolescent Psychosocial Care Center, asking them to explain what they thought about this subject, to describe emblematic cases, and to give their opinions on how the team they work for deals with this issue on a daily basis. In addition to the transcribed interviews, we included in this dissertation a field diary produced at the time I was at the unit to conduct the interviews and a reflective learning portfolio that I prepared years earlier as a resident and that helped us to contextualize elements of the history of this service and the team in engaging in discussions on racial issues. We organized the information produced by the interviews into tables that contained dialogical fragments selected from different analysis focuses: 1) articulations between racism, suffering and interventions in care; 2) team positioning around racial issues; 3) modes of racial classification and 4) filling in the race/color question. We present the results of this research in the form of articles. Article 1 discusses how to incorporate reflection on the racial identity of researchers and interlocutors as elements of analysis in the production of knowledge. To this end, we described our experience in the fieldwork and problematized the way in which the racial self-declaration of our interlocutors raised the need to think about this process. In Article 2, we problematized the relevance of the racial theme in thinking about the mental health of children and adolescents, as well as the care processes offered in specialized services for this public. We observed how many cases followed up in a CAPSia have configurations of suffering that point to racism as one of their main causes. Many black children from Salvador arrive at the unit with complaints related to the construction of self-image, identification with whiteness, experiences of racial violence at school, complaints of self- and hetero-aggressive behavior contextualized by racism. We reflect on the challenges of approaching these cases through the interpersonal dimension of racism, limiting them to an individual problem, and highlight the importance of educational activities for the development of critical thinking in monitoring these situations.