Community work strategic senses: inertias, questioning and the potential of practices in mental health

Abstract

This paper problematizes community mental health practices, identifying their potential to question current professional inertias in health care, with an emphasis on the first level analysis. Moreover, it also discusses the meanings assumed by the community mental health work: the “sense of identity”, as a professional practice of resistance to political, economic and social oppression; the “strategic sense” highlighting its key nature for the transformation of the mental health system; the “emancipatory sense”, as an operation that directs practices towards the rescue of subjectivity; the “transcendental sense”, as a tool to overcome professional inertias, reproducing a capitalist unconscious colonial matrix. It is postulated than in mental health, it is not a matter of achieving a greater accumulation of physical, material and/or technological resources, but of producing contextualized and integrated professional competences, which allow the development of work capacities, considering that every social space is potentially suitable to become a scenario of community practice at the service of the production of care and support. Finally, the decolonial perspective is introduced in order to define mental health practices as those capable of affecting community work in terms of power, knowledge, being, doing and desiring.