(Re) thinking urban mental health from the periphery of São Paulo in times of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Urban mental health studies traditionally search for causal relationships between elements of the city and the prevalence of mental disorders. This paper discusses the importance of (re)thinking the ‘lived urban experience’ from the perspective of city residents about how the immediate environment affects their mental health and how people cope with inequalities. A participatory-action research was implemented in a peripheral area of São Paulo – Brazil, in which volunteers from the territory made phone calls to neighbours to provide emotional support during the COVID-19 pandemic. Weekly supervision meetings were held between volunteers and researchers to discuss the experiences shared by community counterparts. Narratives have shown that the lived experience in the city is mediated by multiple layers of ‘urban insecurities’. These difficulties pressured people to organise and resist in face of pervasive inequalities as well as to respond to unfolding experiences of social suffering. We highlight the potential of participatory methodologies to observe the ways in which subjects face their structural issues and the suffering that emerge in these circumstances. The understanding of how these conflicts are lived at a subjective level can support studies that are wondering about the mechanisms of how social conflicts ‘get under the skin’.

Keywords:

• Brazil
• COVID-19
• mental health
• social medicine
• urban studies

Acknowledgements

The authors immensely thank all the project volunteers who solidly supported the research and dedicated time and energy with us. The authors also thank all the social organizations in the neighbourhood and especially the Human Rights Centre ‘Pablo Gonzales Olalla’. In addition, the authors thank Professor Nikolas Rose, and PhD Gabriel Abarca-Brown for their careful reading and contributions to the final version of this paper. Also, the authors thank the editorial team and peer reviewers for their comments that greatly enriched our debate.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 https://baltimoreneighborsnetwork.org

2 In Brazil a basic food basket is a set of basic necessities for a family to survive for a month. The composition of the food basket is defined by the government and its cost is used as the main component to calculate the national minimum income.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a joint research fund of the State of São Paulo Research Foundation (FAP ESP Grant number: 19/ 17397-7) and the King's College London, under the project “Mental health in adversity: an ethnographic study of the experience of poor mental health in the favelas of São Paulo).