Autonomous Medication Management (GAM) and Damage Reduction in Potiguar Context: a possible composition?
Autonomous Medication Management, Damage Reduction, Drugs, Mental Health.
In Brazil, prohibitionist policies and laws are in constant conflict with the Damage Reduction (RD) policy and
the psychosocial care model, built with the Psychiatric Reform, aimed at taking care of people suffering from
drug use. In this field of tensions, we encounter several problems to ensure humanized and free care. Among
them, the high consumption of psychiatric drugs and pharmacological therapy as the main treatment strategy,
whose participation of people in the decisions about their treatment and their access to prescribing information
are minimal. To address this issue, the Autonomous Medication Management (GAM) strategy was developed in
Canada. Although translated and adapted to the Brazilian context, there is still the challenge of understanding
and assessing its relevance and potentiality in the field of alcohol and other drugs, in its specificities. In order to
broaden the discussion to licit and illicit substances, prescribed and not prescribed, considering the ethical north
of RD, the research aimed to follow the GAM experience in a CAPSad of the city of Natal-RN, mapping its
limits and potentialities. From an intervention research of cartographic inspiration, it was possible to follow the
experience and produce three plans of analytical composition: 1) From the daily and micropolitical experiences
of care, pointing to a dilution in the boundaries between these substances in the perspective of an “autonomous
management of multiple substances”; 2) GAM as a group device, which allows operating the ethics of RD in the
collective and cogestive scope, from the transversality between different knowledge and practices and 3) GAM
as a strategy to promote collective autonomy with the setting up of support networks among the participants. In
conclusion, the meeting between GAM and RD calls us to the ethical-political commitment to the drugs issue, to
the antimanicomial and anti-prohibitionist struggles and, above all, to people's lives.