Authors: Adalberto Barreto, Kenneth Thompson
Year: 2022
Event: 2022 TheMHS Conference
Subject: keynote, community therapy
Type of resource: Conference Presentations and Papers
Abstract: Brazil’s Approach to A Global Mental Health Crisis: Integrative Community Therapy
The evolution of our societies favours isolation, retrenchment, exclusion, rejection and conflicts, creating segregating distortions, harmful interactions and existential precariousness (physical, psychological, economic, social, threat of identity crisis). These situations have been intensifying all over the world during the Covid 19 pandemic.
To face all those challenges, psychiatry in general, and more particularly social psychiatry, must open a new field of activity, research and development, in the field of community mental health, including existing socio-cultural resources, thus opening its field of intervention to the current challenges.
Integrative Community Therapy (ICT) was born in Brazil. Its systemic and anthropological practice offers a space for "listening, speaking and building links" that functions according to precise rules, which safeguard from any possible projection and desire for influence. It allows the participants to take care of themselves and others, through a relationship without "enslavement", allowing the emergence of bonds with others, promoting social integration, the feeling of belonging to a group, and the awakening of self-esteem. In addition to academic knowledge, it seems necessary to rely above all on the knowledge of each culture and on the knowledge and wisdom acquired through life experiences.
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