A Relação do portador de transtorno mental com a comunidade na percepção da família

Abstract

The study aimed to learn the family perceptions about the relation of the mentally ills with the community. The research was qualitative and utilized oral records as its method. The collaborators of the research were twelve families whose siblings had been to the service of psychiatric emergency in the Municipal Hospital of Maringá - PR, in the year of 2008. The families were selected from the Hospital database containing all the patients who had been treated. The data was collected in the residences of the families, from March to May of 2010, utilizing open interview with only one question: "Report with details the way the patient is accepted by the community, neighborhood, family and school". The interviews were taped and transcribed aiming the reliability of the facts; oral history analysis was utilized to guide the research procedures. The study considered the ethical precepts involving researches with human beings and the project was approved by the Permanent Committee of Ethics in Research Involving Human Beings of the State University of Maringá, opinion 509/2009. The routine situations lived by the families and the mentally ill show that their stories were shared with the community, such as neighbors, school and church, since in some cases they had been living in the same place for a long time. Likewise, the alterations of behavior, the suffering, the hospitalizations and possible misunderstandings involving the patient were witnessed by those people since the beginning of the development of the mental perturbation. It is possible to say that even those who followed all the transformations due to the disease have prejudice. They seem to have fear and be ashamed of something they can't explain what; these feelings, along with the prejudice and conclusions based in old concepts of chronicity, immutability and aggressiveness turn the neighbors way from these families, depriving them of social contact and taking away the right of citizenship of the mentally ill. The families related that the bearers of mental perturbation feel incapable, disable and useless before the community in which they live. They can't participate of the routine activities due to the stigma impregnated in the people; they becomes, therefore, isolated of the communal life. The suffering prevails especially regarding depreciative and isolating behaviors of the community and in some cases even of the family, because of the uncertain of the future. It is needed that professionals, especially nurses, help in the construction of a social network in the community in which those patients live, promoting the social reinsertion of both bearers and their families. When it is possible to inform and teach about the manifestations of the mental illnesses and to change habits, it is also possible to forecast the bearers living healthy and being citizens, integrated in the social life. Meanwhile, the moment is of deinstitutionalization and psychiatric reform; so nurses must strive to help the mentally ills and their families during the process of social reinsertion.