Mental health workers: self-care and forms of subjectivity

Abstract

This article questions the way in which nursing assistants from the mental health public network become mental health workers through self-care. Self-care is understood here as technologies of the self, according to the Foucaultian approach. It consists in exercises, technologies and nursing assistants' everyday practices towards themselves (and that constitute a self) through which they recognize themselves as mental health workers. Self-care is also talking about oneself, silence and the dietetics of well-living. These technologies are engendered in the everyday work life and are produced by enunciations of humanization of health and psychosocial rehabilitation. The genealogic approach of Foucault is utilized to analyze the selected empiric material: Law 9716, about the Psychiatric Reform in Rio Grande do Sul, The São Pedro Cidadão official document, Collective Mental Health Magazine, a folder about a seminar on mental Health and interviews with nursing assistants from The São Pedro Psychiatric Hospital.