Historiografia das práticas de automutilação: produção de sentidos em narrativas de jovens no ensino superior

Abstract

Currently, there is an increase in the incidence of self-mutilation in schools and in society in general, configuring a public health problem. We analyzed the literature and observed that most research on this phenomenon has a predominantly biomedical bias, whose focus is on the intrapsychological dimension and that there is no consensus among scholars on how to name it. We evaluated this scenario and observed that it permeates a tendency towards stigma, prejudice, exclusion and medicalization of people involved in these practices. We emphasize the importance of a discussion that also addresses its interpsychological aspects. We also observe the lack of systematic studies that discuss the historicity of these practices. The possibility of opening up to the proposition and diversification of ways of preventing and coping with this phenomenon led us to present this research proposal, which aimed to investigate historiographical implications in the negotiation of meanings about self-mutilation in the narratives of undergraduates in Psychology. This dissertation consists of two chapters formatted as scientific articles. In the first article, we discuss, based on a literature review, a brief historiography of self-mutilation practices, in which we argue that self-mutilation is not just a current practice, as it reveals itself, with diversity, throughout human history, related to sociocultural aspects underlying human experiences in the world. In the second article, we describe an intervention research that we carried out with the aim of investigating historiographic implications in the negotiation of meanings about self-mutilation in the narratives of undergraduates in Psychology. The methodology was a cycle of seven workshops, which consisted of activities to encourage the writing of narratives by the participants. All workshops were held remotely, through the Google Meet platform, to preserve social isolation, rescribed by public health management bodies, as a measure to contain the advance of COVID-19. The results of the cycle of workshops indicated that the participants changed the way they conceived the practices of self-mutilation, signaling the movement of historicity and its implications for living with people who practice it. Based on the methodological procedures used, we concluded that the focus on the historicity of self-mutilation revealed important aspects of living with people who practice self-mutilation. Furthermore, we consider that our critical approach, eminently committed to the cultural and ethical-political aspects of human development, is an encouragement to the necessary opening to the diversification of theoretical methodological approaches to study the phenomenon of self-mutilation practices.