Onde o sonho se rompe, cultivar a vida: uma análise documental da política de saúde mental da Universidade Federal de São Carlos

Abstract

This research emerges from the encounter between a trajectory and a territory: that of the public university and that of the urgencies of the life that inhabits it. It takes as its field of attention the Mental Health Policy of the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), established in 2023, understanding it as a living body in which meanings of care, suffering, and dreams intertwine. Based on a qualitative and situated documentary analysis - which articulates content analysis, discourse analysis, and affective cartography, from the perspective of occupational therapy - the dissertation proposes an engaged reading of the policy as a discursive gesture, an institutional device, and an expression of collective desire. More than describing the normative text, the research traces its flows, tensions, and silences, recognizing in it both the strengths of a university that seeks to foster care and the fissures of a structure still marked by productivist logics and historical exclusions. The research is guided by the following question: how does the UFSCar Mental Health Policy enunciate, regulate and tension meanings of care and suffering, and what symbolic and political effects emerge from these enunciations for the university territory? The results were organized through the analysis of each of the structuring axes of the UFSCar Mental Health Policy. The primary corpus was complemented by exploratory observation of the institutional website and the Instagram profile of the Mental Health Coordination, mobilized as communicational context of the policy. Each axis was read through four movements: its modes of enunciating care; the subjects convened and the responsibilities assigned; its tensions, silences, and displacements; and the openings it affords to occupational therapy. The cross-sectional analysis of the axes pointed to four categories: territory and belonging; production of suffering and care; institutional listening and silencing; and care as a reinvention of life. The work affirms care as a political and poetic act of reinventing life, and understands university mental health as a contested field in which the challenge is to cultivate spaces that sustain belonging, diversity, and creation. In short, the dissertation is a manifesto of attention and resistance, arguing that where the dream is broken, it is possible to cultivate life.