Narrativas de Indígenas Urbanos Terenas sobre a Saúde Mental da comunidade durante a Pandemia de COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has mobilized health authorities all over the world due to the high rates of transmission and lethality, causing the death of thousands of people. The pandemic has imposed health challenges, especially on socially vulnerable groups, among which are Indigenous peoples and urban Indigenous peoples or those living in demarcated territories who, like other social groups, have faced the effects of social distancing on their mental health, in addition to difficulties in accessing health services. The singularities of this group and the need for health care measures that take ethnic aspects into account indicate the importance of investigations that include Indigenous and native peoples. In this sense, we place the Terenas, who live in an urban village, located in the city of Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, which make up the population to be studied in this work. Thus, this dissertation aims to understand the narratives of urban Indigenous people about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of a Terena community that resides in an urban village in Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul. The research was developed in two stages: in the first, an integrative review was carried out, seeking to identify and analyze the scientific productions that consider the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of Brazilian Indigenous peoples. For this, the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), the Periódicos Eletrônicos em Psicologia (Pepsic) and the Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (Lilacs) databases were consulted, using the Boolean terms "Indigenous" and "COVID-19". The analysis corpus consisted of 17 publications. In the second stage, narrative interviews were conducted with 07 Indigenous people, one man (cacique) and six women, who live in the urban village of Terena, chosen as the context of the investigation. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and submitted to Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. The integrative literature review indicates that, during the pandemic, the mental health of Indigenous people was impaired, being more compromised by their relationship with whites than by the loss of lives due to the new coronavirus. Governments, by implementing biosecurity measures guided by the World Health Organization and Eurocentric strategies to contain the Pandemic in Indigenous communities in Latin America, inflicted a whole knowledge and culture that, while being ineffective in controlling COVID-19, it also promoted anguish and aspects of colonization. In general, the interviews reveal that, especially in the first months of the pandemic, urban Indigenous people perceived the pandemic as a very distant phenomenon and shared the idea that the new disease would not arrive in Brazil with the same lethal potential. Respondents also perceive the pandemic as one of the consequences of the colonization process of Brazilian native peoples. Faced with the pandemic, with a high and uncontrolled rate of contagion and several cases of death, the Terena population began to live with the fear of contagion, of dying and losing loved ones, as well as the lack of treatments and the scarcity of means of guaranteeing the survival. In addition, social distancing measures, while protecting against contagion, produced feelings of sadness and fear, especially due to the decrease in community interaction, which is very present in the sociability of this group. It is also noticed that mourning was very present in the interviewees' speeches, either by a relative victimized by COVID-19, by the loss of the previous way of life or by the loss of their own identity that had to change to adapt to the new reality. Participating Indigenous people report difficulties in accessing health services, as well as the federal government's neglect in caring for indigenous peoples during the pandemic. In this sense, the evangelical churches, and the community itself were identified as the main supporters of the group during this period. The study points to the need to broaden the understanding of the needs of Indigenous and indigenous peoples during the pandemic, reflecting on the damage to the mental health of this group. In addition, it is necessary to build mental health practices that give voice to this group and consider their specificities, in an intersectional perspective.