PLAYING CARE, DREAMING RESEARCH: A WALK WITH AUTONOMOUS MANAGEMENT OF MEDICATION AND HARM REDUCTION
Drugs; Harm Reduction; Autonomous Medication Management; Self Care;
This research intends to map Self Care practices of drug users who share experiences among each other in a Psychological Care Center for alcohol and other drugs (Caps-ad), in a small city in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. In this environment, where the researcher entered as a resident in Mental Health from the University of Pernambuco (UPE), a group inspired by Autonomous Medication Management (AMM) was held between May and November of 2019. The experience was registered in field diaries, with both the events from the group’s meetings and their reverberations in other spaces of the Center and the city, in addition to the researcher’s dreams, which allowed other perspectives of the field. The dreams taken as an event, a method of knowledge, and thought as a political means, enabled the development of the research. They were placed, side by side, with what was lived in the “awake study field”, becoming elements of such importance that there was a point in which certain ideas of this work were literally dreamed. In order to update the experience and analyze its echoes, we returned to the Center and carried out cartographic interviews with the people from the group, in December, 2021. The field diaries, “dream diaries”, and interviews served as resources for the composition of narratives that unfold into analyzing themes, which we intend to discuss, namely: Deinstitutionalization processes; Drugs-Medicine links – Autonomous Medication Management and Harm Reduction; Self care and care for others in the research, and AMM. It is concluded that the Autonomous Management of Medication, when aligned with the ethical-political arrow of Harm Education, presents strong means to produce resistance in the face of the medicalization processes of the lives of those who consume drugs, expanding and legitimizing knowledge, with effects of autonomy and increase in Self Care.