Academic everyday life, mental health and occupational therapy: encounters between researching and caring for self and other

Abstract

This text was presented at an open class organized by three Post-Graduate Programs in Occupational Therapy in Brazil: Post-Graduate Program in Occupational Therapy at UFSCar, Post-Graduate Program in Occupational Studies at UFMG and Professional Masters in Occupational Therapy and Social Inclusion Processes at USP. The invitation made to me highlighted the difficult times we have been living and the various manifestations of psychic suffering of post-graduate students, and proposed an exploration of the current challenges of being an occupational therapist researcher, in dialogue with the production of care and mental health. This text is an attempt to open a conversation about how to be an occupational therapist and researcher in a way that considers distinguishing, but not separating, knowledge production, care production and mental health. Ten gestures guided the path taken: approaching the problem; putting it under analysis, considering its actualization in daily experiences in the spaces of knowledge production; looking more attentively at the spaces of knowledge production; feeling the effects on us; thinking about resistances, care, and the creation of other ways of life in the spaces of knowledge; slowing down science; listening to the feminists; embodying the becoming; becoming to care; and, imagining.