Doubly lethal: the psychological havoc of health care workers during the covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

In this article, I seek to expose and develop how the precariousness of the Unified Health System (SUS) affects the processes of subjectivation of those bodies that compose it. Using data collected from an ethnographic incursion in a Center for Psychosocial Care Alcohol and Drugs (CAPS AD), in a city in the interior of São Paulo, the text that follows is organized by an elaboration of the impacts that major epidemiological events have on the mental health of the populations they affect, particularly in the case of health professionals who conduct their professional practices under these contexts. Furthermore, I aim to work on the particularity of the pandemic of covid-19 from an examination of the political contingencies that make the Brazilian case unique within the global context of the pandemic. In a second moment, I connect macro-structural political processes to everyday micro-politics of care and the affections they engage. To demonstrate these ways in which major changes affect individual trajectories, I use the theoretical basis developed by the field of the anthropology of emotions. To support the argument, I used interviews and ethnographic narratives that were part of my field material during the course of my master’s degree which took place entirely during the covid-19 pandemic.