Carlos Caroso

Proposta metodológica para análise de dados qualitativos em dois níveis

The aim of this proposed methodology is to reveal the relationships between the sociocultural environment and the health-illness process. The premises of this analysis include: focusing on the structure of the text to interpret it based on explanation and not on understanding; placing the text in historical context and consdering it in relation with others of the same genre. The first level of analysis, or analysis based on questions, concerns the cultural domains and the content of the narratives referring to the information obtained from direct responses to questions formulated by the researcher. The second level of analysis, or analysis based on narratives, refers to digressions from the theme initially proposed by the researchers in a semi-structured interview. The analytical procedures of the second level consist in the construction of maps of the semantic network of the narratives, which will be used in a later hierarchical comparison.

Manejo comunitário em saúde mental e experiência da pessoa

The importance of community support to people who present problematic behaviors, particularly to the role played by the family as a social support network in the recovery and social reintegration of the sick person, is the main emphasis of this article. Practices and actions on which family and other community members engage are discussed through the idea of community therapeutic management , assumed to constitute a set of initiatives of certain social networks, meant to face the implications resulting from the health problem, among which are daily care, treatment seeking behavior and efforts towards one’s social rehabilitation and reintegration.

A sina de curar: a palavra de um terapeuta religioso

This article discusses the life experiences of an afro-descendent medicine man, based on fragments of his early biography, hand written by himself and named “Entry into a life of suffering and bitterness”. Returning to the anthropological tradition on the study of narratives, and aiming to apply an ethnocritical approach to the reading of the narrative, we have interpreted his discourse in order to understand a) his narrative strategy, b) the technique of text construction and c) the contextual meanings of his discourse, elaborated to reinforce his condition of being a sufferer, and that constitutes the recurring element, out of which he formulates his explanation for his “fate” of healing other peoples suffering and pain.

A Critical View of the Use of the Concept of Leisure as a Tool Analysis in Mental Health Studies

Abstract In this article, we critically review how leisure has been related to mental health. In some of the reviewed studies, leisure is understood as a series of activities performed outside of work domains, or as an adjective for qualifying some activities that are performed by people in their free time. In this article, we defend the idea that assessing leisure activities with the use of closed questionnaires cannot adequately account for the heterogeneity of its subjective experiences and meanings, because the characteristics of leisure are implicitly pre-defined in the questions themselves. These questionnaires, in other words, do not allow people to express their own meanings of leisure. Rather, they merely assess an individual’s abilities to fulfil a set of pre-established requirements. We defend that one must turn to interpretive ethnography and to linguistics to properly understand the relationship between leisure and mental health. This involves looking for the encyclopaedic meaning of words, instead of relying on scales that represent them as tangible things in the natural world.