With the presence of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, Unicamp held between the 22nd and 24th of February, the 1st International Meeting of the Psychoanalysis in Psychiatry Section of World Psychiatric Association. Already considered historic, the meeting brought together scholars from Brazil and the world to discuss new foundations of the relationship between psychiatry and psychoanalysis and the way in which the two areas must prepare themselves in order to face the great contemporary challenges in the field of mental health.
Coordinator of the event, professor of the Department of Psychiatry at the Faculty of Medical Sciences (FCM) at Unicamp Mario Eduardo Costa Pereira said that the meeting brought together psychiatrists and psychoanalysts for “a great debate”.
“We are experiencing multiple crises in the field of mental health. Just look around and see all the evil that affects us, with the multiplication and increase in rates of mental disorders, the increase in medication consumption and the new challenges that we will face, such as the effects psychosocial consequences arising of climate change”, he stated.
Pereira says that, at the end of last year, he was in Vienna (Austria), at the World Congress of Psychiatry and several symposiums addressed the issue of climate and its impact on people. “Issues that take into account climate change and its impacts were discussed, such as population displacements, victims of catastrophes and many losses, unfortunately. We need to see how this will all be organized in terms of mental health. This is a big debate”, said the professor.
Another aspect of the new frontiers of study are, for example, the impacts of the covid-19 pandemic on the field of mental health. “It is increasingly realized that the effects were not only immediate, but also medium and long term, both in situations of mourning, in people who lost relatives, and in sequelae caused by the disease itself, in addition to problems arising from that period. , which put many people in a state of crisis and triggered emotional situations that are still ongoing”, he adds. “Therefore, better understanding the impact of the pandemic in the medium and long term is still a challenge for all fields of mental health.”
Scientific and technical issues
Pereira says that the importance of the event lies in the fact that it brings together the two areas – the more humanistic area of psychoanalysis with the area of psychiatry, which, according to him, in recent times, has invested primarily in scientific and technical issues. “And also because we are once again opening a dialogue between these two fields that were separated for decades”, he reinforces.
According to the professor, this is the first international meeting of the Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry Section of the World Psychiatric Association. He recalled that the symposium featured conferences by two presidents of the World Psychiatric Association, who spoke to psychoanalysts.
“In addition, we had the presence here of the former president of the World Medical Association of the International Psychoanalytic Association and some of the most important psychoanalysts in Brazil and the world. The most important psychiatrists came together to see if they could find new forms of dialogue, of collaboration between the fields of psychoanalysis and psychiatry to face the concrete problems of today”, he concluded.
Opening ceremony
The rector of Unicamp, Antonio José de Almeida Meirelles, who participated in the seminar's opening ceremony, thanked FCM for the initiative.
According to him, it is important for the University to address a current issue, which brings insecurity to society, and relate it, for example, to the impacts caused by climate change on people.
“Unicamp has this tradition of always trying to look at these problems from different angles of science and knowledge”, stated the rector. “We have the most technological area, the area of basic sciences, but we also have the area of humanities, biological sciences and health, which are looking at human beings and human populations in the face of these new challenges”, he concluded.
Tropical florests
Graduated in History from Federal University of Acre, the minister has a specialization in psychoanalytic theory from the University of Brasília and in psychopedagogy from the Catholic University of Brasília. Silva's exhibition was titled “Psychosocial incidences of the climate crisis and the devastation of tropical forests”.
The minister drew attention to the importance of tropical forests when it comes to living conditions on the planet. Silva said that Brazilian forests hold 11% of the planet's carbon stock, which means, according to her, the equivalent of ten years of emissions from the entire planet.
“In other words, we have a carbon missile aimed at the atmosphere, if our forests are destroyed,” he warned. And he also recalled that Brazil is an agricultural power exclusively because it is a water power. “But without the forest we will not be a water power nor an agricultural power,” he said.
The minister recalled that a mapping carried out by the National Center for Natural Disaster Monitoring and Alerts (Cemaden) shows that, of the 5 thousand Brazilian municipalities, 1.038 are subject to extreme climate events, many of them associated with phenomena such as deforestation, the use of fossil fuels or livestock farming.
“The anguish that affects all of us, especially young people, I call 'future depression'. Because they [young people] have no future prospects. There is no way. The vertigo of the unpredictable comes from the lack of support for the conditions that guarantee the life of the individual and the planet. So, it is understandable that we are experiencing many forms of anxiety”, he assesses.
The minister, because of this, proposes a change of life. “We moved away from the ideal of 'being' – which guided humanity towards mercantilism – and went towards the ideal of 'having'”, he said. “The Greeks wanted to be wise. The Romans wanted to be big and strong. The Egyptians wanted to be immortal. In the Middle Ages, even with all the sins committed in the name of holiness, people wanted to be holy. Commercialism, however, has shifted us towards the ideal of ‘having’,” she explained.
For Silva, human beings have an infinite capacity to desire to have things, on a planet that, however, is finite. Hence, he stated, a paradox arises. “We have an infinite capacity to desire, on a planet that limits us”, he assesses. “The planet cannot serve 8 billion people with an infinite capacity to desire things.”
“Maybe we have to move towards the ideal of 'being', because, if there is a limit to 'having', there is no limit to 'being'”, he pondered. “We may have to carry out a process of disidentification with this civilizational model that is leading us not only to destroy ourselves, but to destroy the conditions that promote and sustain life on the planet”, he warned.
