Psicologia Histórico-Cultural na Universidade (volume II): saúde mental, sofrimento psíquico e psicopatologia

Abstract

Volume II, on Historical-Cultural Psychology at the University, focuses on a current theme that is socially relevant to public health policy and the Psychiatric Reform movement in Brazil, and also to research and training in Psychology: the theme of Mental Health and its connections with the totality of social life and with human (cultural) development. The collection advances, and deepens, theoretical-conceptual reflections and discussions of professional practice in Mental Health - some already presented and, in part, developed in Volume I, published by this university press, under the title Historical-Cultural Psychology at the University: research implicated. It now offers, in addition to a historical-conceptual introduction chapter of the general theme, nine other chapters that have Dialectical Historical Materialism and Historical-Cultural Psychology in common: interpretive-explanatory, methodological keys and also support pillars for practices of care, in the field of Psychosocial Care for human suffering and situations that obliterate individual development towards the appropriation, and fruition, of the historical heritage of humankind.To the reflections combat the growing social medicalization and also seek to reveal the links between health-disease phenomena, such as psychic suffering, with other socially and historically produced phenomena in Brazilian society, considering its peripheral insertion in the world capitalist order. They are not simple, nor are they directly visible, understandable, much less easily explained, the significant singular implications of determinations structural, on the subjectivity and (deterioration of) mental health of the vast majority of the Brazilian population that makes up the working class, which is impacted by the degrading force of capital, by ideologies and mechanisms of its reproduction that govern social relations of work, spreading to other relational spheres of social life. This is the challenge, of unveiling complex phenomena, which the texts in this collection, as a whole, strive to make some, even modest, critical, analytical and propositional contributions. Topics such as: - suicide and youth; - social genesis of depression and bipolarity, seen as disorders with increasing prevalence in the population; - psychopathies and their relationship with the class struggle; - the expansion and intensification of anxiety states in the world of work; - the organicist theses on schizophrenia, fallacious due to their incompleteness, which form the basis for the increase in profits in the pharmaceutical sector; - the pathologization of social problems, such as the infractions of adolescents (being psychiatricized), which grow associated with the lack of protection of children/adolescents, and families, from the fractions of the working class most negatively impacted by the orderworld capitalist; - in addition to systematizing certain contents and reflections for the teaching of psychopathology in undergraduate courses; deepen the elucidation of certain key theoretical-methodological categories for research on psychic suffering - such as the affective-cognitive unit of the activity-consciousness-personality system; and offer arguments in favor of new, or to be revisited, less individualizing mental health care strategies and more community-based, such as working with families. In times of ultra-conservative and ultra-liberal right-wing management in the country, extreme environmental degradation, private interests dominating the management of an overwhelming health crisis, record profits in the banking sector and agribusiness simultaneously with the increase in hunger, poverty and inequality in Brazil, and generalized state lack of responsibility in relation to the nation's social well-being, we hope that the book will help in professional motivations and in the political, emancipatory struggle, in defense of life and for a different model of society.