Mental health team: discourse analysis about the practice in the psychiatric reform

Abstract

In Brazilian context the Psychiatric Reform is introducing important challenges to think about the mental health team’s education. This study aims to analyze the discourse of one mental health worker about the own practice, focusing inherent aspects to the formation of the team for working in the substitutive services. We sought to extract some doubts, positioning or ideologies that permeate the insertion of this worker in the current context of psychiatric care. This is a qualitative research, developed in 2006 at a substitutive service of a city of the southern Brazil. We used the critical discourse analysis (CDA. The results point that the psychiatric reform context is capable to reorient discourses and to process changes, at the same time where it finds barriers that difficult its consolidation. The team’s formation starts to incorporate interdisciplinary knowledge, for example. However, in the practical field it is still focused in abilities and competences division, close to the multidisciplinary knowledge. We hope that this study serves as a subsidy for other studies Mental Health to enlarge, discursively, the understanding of how our society relates with the mad and madness, and with the approaches and distancing characteristic of this relationship.

Descriptors: Mental health; Social sciences; Psychiatric nursing.