Cartas para o futuro: cartografias de memórias minoritárias como resistência na luta antimanicomial potiguar

Abstract

The present thesis addresses the defense of minority memory and history within the field of mental health in Rio Grande do Norte through the narration, testimonies, and reports of users of the health network who are part of an antimanicomial struggle collective in Natal. Although the history of the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform successfully narrates the various experiences, highlighting the particularities and characteristics of this movement, we note the infrequent or sometimes absent reports from mental health network users, many of whom are witnesses and historical actors in the psychiatric reform process. Supported by Walter Benjamin's theses on history, experience, and narration, as well as contributions from the thoughts of Deleuze, Guattari, institutional analysis, and decolonial studies, the goal was to map these users' memories through interviews, following the antimanicomial collective's actions, and the production of letters as an aesthetic element to narrate their experiences, in order to think about another history of mental health in Rio Grande do Norte, an invisible and unheard history. The development of the research followed a contextualization of the historical moment in which it is inserted, followed by the methodological bases supporting an immersive cartographic research of the users' memories. Through a bibliographic review on memory, its collectivization, and transmission, we examine classical European authors, approaching decolonial authors. This was done to reflect on the production of a minority memory, taken here in analogy to the idea of minority as present in the concept of minor literature by Deleuze and Guattari, as a subversion of a minority within a major language or the revolutionary condition of all literature, situated within the established universal literature, through collective enunciations, the deterritorialization of language, and political dimension. Through the production of letters made from the interview reports we sought to articulate the concepts brought forth to tension the relationship between knowledge and experience. Furthermore, a collective construction of ways to publicize these mapped memories/stories, creating, together with the other research participants, spaces where these stories can continue to be shared.