Saúde mental e relações étnico-raciais no Brasil: narrativas de Lima Barreto, leituras historiográficas e elucubrações ulteriores.

Abstract

The field of Mental Health is endowed with multiple and distinct nuances that are necessary for a more accurate and careful analysis of the phenomena to be understood in this context – nuances among which we highlight, with overpowering, Brazilian ethnic and racial issues. The present study, therefore, derives from a research, at a doctoral level, whose general objective is to identify the narratives produced on the relationship between Mental Health and racism in the early 20th century, in Brazil, from the autobiographical work Diário do Hospício & O Cemitério dos Vivos (1956), by Lima Barreto. Such research comprises the theoretical, methodological and critical field of Collective Health, from its area of concentration in Social Sciences in Health, also being at the interface between Mental Health and Ethnic and Racial Studies. It starts from a qualitative and bibliographic approach (MINAYO; DESLANDES; ROMEU, 2012), and its method of production and data analysis is the Analysis of Autobiographical Narratives – as will be seen, respectively, in Schütze (1976; 2014) and Jovchelovitch and Bauer (2002). This method was applied to the analysis of the aforementioned work, and collaborated in the very conception of organization of the present study, which will be arranged in seven segments, namely: (1st) Presentation (or Self Narrative); (2nd) Introductory Considerations: Firstfruits; (3rd) Theoretical-Methodological Considerations: The Analysis of Autobiographical Narratives in Public Health; (4th) Theoretical-Critical Considerations: Historical and Contemporary Readings of Brazilian Scientific Thought on Mental Health and Racism in the 20th and 21st Centuries; (5th) Systematic Review of Scientific Literature: Lima Barreto, Madness and Madness in Lima Barreto; (6th) Analysis and Discussion of Results: Narratives by Lima Barreto and Further Elucubrations; and (7th) Final Considerations: Finishings. As a result, it is worth noting that Lima Barreto was one of the first black Brazilian men to have written about the reality of a psychiatric hospital in the country, as a patient, during his own hospitalization. It cannot be categorically stated that his racial and asylum experiences led him to the mishaps he encountered in life; however, such mishaps are added to a set of analyzes that the author himself produced, in his works, about life in Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century. In these, he evidences the existence of an oppressive system before the population that is metaphorized in the expression of what should be “care” for “alienated” or “crazy” people, but which ends up revealing itself as something extremely humiliating – especially when directed to black people. Therefore, far from proposing definitive conclusions, we seek to provoke which places were reserved for the national psychological/psychiatric thought of the time in the selected work of Lima Barreto, so that this research can, then, guide the analysis of our professional practices in Mental Health today, avoiding the repetition of mistakes of the past and provoking the production of practices in Mental Health that propose, effectively, anti-asylum and anti-racist positions.