Do sofrimento psicológico entre universitários: uma etnografia com jovens estudantes e grupos terapêuticos

Abstract

The main subject of this dissertation is how a form of suffering, the psychological distress, is constructed and experienced by young college students. The objects of analysis are the practices and discourses that produce psychological distress, as well as ways to overcome this experience. After identifying the importance and recurrence of psychological distress in the development of life experience among these students, I sought to explore the subject through an ethnographic research. Thus, this dissertation begins going deep into some issues raised by students' speech about how it is to suffer psychologically and what relationship this experience has with university life . In this first step I resorted to open interviews with students who had undergone psychotherapeutic processes. At a second moment, the research enters the boundaries of a research institution and university extension affiliated with the SUS ( Unified Health System ), which develops an Extension Project titled Group Therapy University Youth (GTJU). The project created by the School Health Unit (USE) Mental Health Program (PSM) intended to develop therapeutic tactics to help these young people cope with psychological distress, as professionals observed an excessively high demand for this cohort of young people. From this moment on, psychological distress among young college students becomes analyzed through the prism of Public Health. Therefore, the ethnography delves beyond observation and collaboration with the therapeutic groups and the Mental Health Program. Some native categories observed during group therapy and along the meetings of the PSM led me to extend the analysis to the institutional and technical-scientific discourses that guided certain therapeutic practices. Discourses on youth with special attention to youth protagonism and health with its unfoldings about mental health and the concept of vulnerability are articulated to the configuration of a specific type of subject: the citizen.