Between screens and connections: a proposal for anti-asylum care in the pandemic context (2020 - 2023)
Therapeutic Accompaniment, Pandemic, Mental Health, Social Distancing, Clinic.
The present research is based on the intention of remembering and sharing experiences of Therapeutic Accompaniment (TA) practiced in virtual and face-to-face meetings, during and after the advent of the pandemic crises. The meeting with two convivas of the Centro de Convivencia e Cultura de Natal (CECCO), that we named Inventores, Coragem and Viagem - in a reference to their ways of being in the world – is the foundation of this cooperative investigation, space of provocative summons of displacements and inventions, having in mind other ways of mobilized listening, beyond the psychotherapy model initially demanded by the service. Guided by the theory and practice of TA as a clinical-political-antiasylum, used the production of cartographic narratives as a method, based on the records of the lived made in field diaries, named Diários de Andanças, aiming to explore the possibilities of reinvention of an anti-asylum clinic in the pandemic context. The experiences of TA shared with the reader point to the opening of relational spaces in the face of the effects of intensification of suffering brought by social isolation and restriction of access to mental health services, and speak of the power of the invention of new ways of listening to the singularity before the prisons operated by the medicalization and silencing of suffering. The ability to delimit the Other and carve out a place for the singular subject, flourish through this exercise of cohabitation of the TA, which makes the struggle for the effectiveness of the Rede de Atenção Psicossocial, that was scrapped by the capitalist system in service of neoliberal logic, imperative by the day. The contact of the TA with the RAPS of Natal appears as a deinstitutionalizing agent, confirming the need for its permanent place in the mental healthcare network, beyond the university projects and connected with the urgent demands of the city's health workers.