Pacientes, experientes e outros-que-humanos : narrativas e grafias na luta antimanicomial

Abstract

From an ecological perspective (INGOLD, 2012, 2013, 2019, 2023; HARAWAY, 2022, 2023; STENGERS, 2002; DESPRET, 2023), this research seeks to highlight that the ways of meaning atypical experiences, as living phenomena, with sensorial expression , sometimes as symptoms of mental illnesses, sometimes as variations of human experience in the world, are decisive for the production of suffering or for the production of more tolerant and plural modes of relationships. The research universe was constituted from the ethnographic encounter with people linked to the International Voice Hearers Movement and people who have undergone psychiatric hospitalizations, all militants of the Anti-Asylum Fight, who have atypical sensory experiences, interpreted as symptoms by the biomedical and psi fields. The central argument of the thesis argues that the circulation of sensitive narratives related to life trajectories, as well as the practice of “speculative fabulation” (HARAWAY, 2023) in communion with people's experiences, allows us to imagine other worlds to live in. I accept the premise that dreams prepare us to live reality. So the thesis expresses part of a dream world in which dignity, collaborative agencies, respect for diversity, freedom and care for life are assumed as inseparable parts of what we understand as health and what we desire as reality. By proposing other images for atypical sensory experiences, this exercise of imagination that also requires forms of solidarity engagement with the world, sets out to deconstruct the violent culture of normality, unworlding “madness” as it is conceived in the West, to reinvent sanity and the right to singular intensities. Working with ethnobiographies creates space for the recording and sensitive sharing of life experiences crossed by the field of health, the experience of extraordinary phenomena and the violence that comes with the label of madness. With this, together with the interlocutors, we produce discursive gaps, based on their experiences, which allow us to denaturalize what is considered normal, what is madness and what is sanity. Finally, I reaffirm our movement towards making words move, so that they reverberate through the spaces in which they are necessary, creating new images for a conception of sanity produced in becoming-with. I believe that, through the production and sharing of narratives — visual, sound and verbal — be possible to create new sensibilities for plural worlds.