Significações e vivências sobre saúde mental de mulheres estudantes da educação superior em tempos de pandemia por covid-19

Abstract

This doctoral research addresses mental health and Higher Education during the pandemic. The general objective is to understand the meanings and experiences of mental health of women undergraduate students at UFAL during the pandemic due to COVID-19. The specific aims are: to apprehend the meanings of the mental health of female undergraduate students during the pandemic; to understand the mental health experiences of female undergraduate students during the pandemic; to identify student demands regarding mental health in the pandemic through the PROEST - UFAL psychological reception service. To understand the pandemic for female students were established a gender perspective. The participants of this research are 10 female undergraduate students at UFAL and 5 Psychology professionals from PROEST at UFAL. That is qualitative research, and the theoretical assumptions are Historical-Dialectic Materialism and Psychology based on dialectical materialism. In this sense, studying mental health and psychic suffering uses contributions of Pathopsychology. The categories used to understand the phenomenon were: Totality, Historicity, Mediation, Sense, Meaning, and Experience. Also, articulations with gender were relevant due to the participants in this research. A literature review is presented about the theoretical assumptions and categories that guide this research, and about mental health, in a broad and university. Based on a dialectical conception of reality, a spiral movement dialogue with the knowledge already produced and on the knowledge built in this research. In this research, the instruments were used: a questionnaire, interview, and photograph. The meaning core, the theoreticalmethodological resource, was used to analyze and interpret the data and was used with categories of Historical-Dialectic Materialism and Psychology based on dialectical materialism. Through the questionnaire, the interview, and the photograph, it was possible to access and analyze the profile of the participants, the images of everyday life, and the speeches produced by the women students. Still, interviews with psychology professionals at the university made it possible to understand some academic demands related to mental health and contributed to a broad view of this phenomenon. The photographs were systematized into imagery thematic categories and articulated with the discussions in the meaning core. There are four meaning cores referring to the women students and two meaning cores about the male and female psychologists. In the movement of analysis through the meaning core, some of the singularities and particularities observed constituted the academic life during the pandemic and the meanings and experiences of the student's mental health. As a result, the profile of the women students was: brown, single, average income of one minimum wage, live with their family and contribute to the family income, and were in their first graduation. During the pandemic, they felt changes in mental health, manifested by increased anxiety, stress, lack of motivation, and worsening sleep quality. Regarding aspects related to domestic life, domestic work and motherhood increased and intensified in the women students' routines. It is still important to highlight the changes in academic life due to the need to adhere to emergency remote teaching and social distancing that have modified the study activity to be carried out at home, taking into account access to the internet and equipment, good location and the relationships between people who coexist in the domestic environment. For people with disabilities, remote teaching intensified the reality of exclusion. In this sense, some relevant mediators to understand women students' mental health of students during the pandemic are family relationships, remote teaching, housework, motherhood, the inclusion of people with disabilities, and the centralization of these relationships in the home environment. Changes in personal and academic routines, as well as the loss of family members, are situations imposed by the pandemic and are part of the meanings and experiences of these women students during the pandemic. In this context, these relationships are in a neoliberal capitalist society that has intensified and deepened social inequalities, which were already before the pandemic, in a scenario of the health crisis. Among them, gender inequalities have increased and made situations of overload that affect women's mental health even more noticeable. Still, the exclusion of people with disabilities shows social inequality, which has become evident during the pandemic. From an intersectional perspective, the exclusion relations involve gender, race, class, and disability. In addition, in facing this reality, it is relevant to highlight the human being in its possibilities of development, resistance, and creation that coexist with the manifestations of social inequalities, how to be socially active, and search for social changes. Thus, there are sickening or alienating social relationships about mental health, and there are relationships that enable human development and emancipation, which coexist contradictorily in the dialectical movement of reality. Thus, psychic suffering is a kind of expression of mental health as a social phenomenon historically situated. Changes in the quality of mental health are related to women students' social environment. Social inequalities are constructed historically and increased in psychic suffering during this period, and women as a social group present greater social vulnerability in crisis scenarios. An analysis of these relationships enabled us to apprehend meanings and experiences regarding the women students' mental health during the pandemic. The dialogue with psychologists contributed to understanding the academic reality and mental health in the university context. So, it is possible to observe the interrelationships between the meaning core built from the speeches of students and psychologists about mental health socially and historically situated. Still, this study has an analytical contribution to the use of photographs in the meaning cores.