OLIVEIRA, Débora Ortolan Fernandes de. “Woman, mother, and mad”: the emotional experience of CAPS users regarding mental illness. 2024. (Doctoral Dissertation) – Graduate Program in Psychology, School of Life Sciences, Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas, Campinas, 2024.
Available on: https://repositorio.sis.puc-campinas.edu.br/handle/123456789/17363?locale-attribute=pt_BR
Abstract: This study aimed to understand the emotional experience of women-mothers undergoing treatment in a Psychosocial Attention Center III (CAPS III) regarding the process of mental illness from the participants’ own perspectives. By considering that contemporary society is structurally sexist, with women being strongly oppressed while also heterogeneous and complex, sexism takes shape differently across multiple social contexts. We are interested in reflecting on female suffering at the intersection with mental health, given the urgency of a critical and intersectional perspective for thinking about women’s mental health in Brazil. This study is organized as qualitative research using a psychoanalytic method, developed through three individual transitional interviews with five women who were users of a CAPS III and were referred by the professionals who monitor them. The transitional interviews, guided by the Winnicottian concept of management, were structured around one main question – “What do you think happened to you for you to be here at CAPS?”, from which the participants were able to speak freely about their stories, along with the use of the mediating resource Thematic Drawing-and-Story Procedure, adapted as a way of prioritizing ethical care for a vulnerable population. The research material consists of two types of narrative productions: (a) the interviewees’ imaginative productions and (b) transferential narratives, in which the researcher already offers an interpretative elaboration of what was experienced in the meetings with the participants. In a collaborative effort with the research group, the material was psychoanalytically interpreted in terms of two emotional-affective meaning fields and one subfield, which we entitled “There are evils that come for bad”, and its subfield “Surviving on dry soil”, and “Ain’t I a woman?”. The general framework suggests that these women were repeatedly traumatized throughout their lives, with mental illness being one of the traumas experienced. Given that their history of illness is inserted in the fields of motherhood and conjugality within the context of a patriarchal society, they feel deprived of their womanhood for not meeting social expectations regarding care. Beyond the ideal of shared motherhood, they expose that in our country not all forms of motherhood are well regarded, despite being directly associated with conditions of social precarity. Overall, being a peripheral, Black, woman-mother undergoing mental health treatment and a victim of violence in Brazil constitutes a convergence of intersections in which multiple forms of oppression operate in producing suffering, given their traumatizing and dehumanizing potential.