GRANATO, Tania Mara Marques. Between dreams and nightmares: the collective imaginary of professionals about adolescents in mental health. 246 f. Doctoral Thesis (Doctorate in Psychology), Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas (PUC-Campinas), 2024.
Available on: http://repositorio.sis.puc-campinas.edu.br/xmlui/handle/123456789/17362
Objective: We aimed to investigate the collective imaginary of public mental health professionals about adolescents with mental disorders and their future perspectives. This is justified as the production of comprehensive knowledge that, considering the challenge of caring for adolescents in conditions of unfavorable intersectionalities, such as belonging to subordinate classes and having psychiatric disorders, can contribute to improving the clinical care provided by health teams. The study is organized theoretically and methodologically as empirical qualitative research, using the psychoanalytic method informed by dramatic-bind theories, including itself among the relational perspectives that thrive in contemporary psychoanalysis. Method: We conducted transitional collective interviews, organized around the Thematic Drawing-and-Story Procedure [D-E (T)], with 15 professionals from a Child and Youth Psychosocial Care Center, divided into three groups of five participants. We asked them to draw and write a story about “A teenager in mental health care”, and then about “That teenager in 10 years”. The preliminary interpretation of the material produced by the participants indicated meaning gaps and professional demand for support, qualified listening, training, and clinical reflection, which led us to create a form of feedback interview. We created a Feedback Interactive Narrative as a dialogical resource developed from the imaginative productions about the teenagers’ future. The meetings were registered as an Initial Associative Report (IAR) derived from memories. IARs and Drawing-and-Story Procedure (D-E) were shared with the research group to expand the interpretative meanings and refine the elaboration of Transference Narratives, in which the inter-human encounter is described in terms of interactions, occurrences, impressions, and the researcher’s subjective feelings, in addition to the Drawing-and-Story Procedure. Results: This material supported the interpretative production of three affective-emotional meaning fields underlying the collective imaginary about adolescents: “Endless question mark”, “Last year I died, but this year I won’t die”, and “Network of the helpless”, which respectively, show that adolescents are seen as a great unknown by professionals, making it difficult to approach the drama they have experienced. In the future, professionals project fantasies of success and inclusion for adolescents who would overcome past adversities. Finally, we identified feelings of helplessness and exclusion shared by adolescents and professionals. Conclusion: We conclude that even though professionals feel lonely and challenged by the complexity of the task, they keep hope alive in the work they do, pointing out, however, the importance of developing care actions for professionals to promote their mental health and qualify the care offered to adolescents in mental health.