This study analyzes the care provided to adolescents in crisis in a municipality in Greater Metropolitan Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The article reports on a qualitative health study that used Therapeutic Itinerary and Life Narratives as the methodological resources. The principal theoretical reference was psychoanalyst René Kaës. Based on the adolescents’ own verbal accounts, the study aimed to grasp the collective realities that could potentially shed light on the different types of logic and professional practices applied to care for adolescents in psychosocial crisis situations. The underlying assumption was that an approach to the dialectical nature of the crisis required maintaining a framework that would allow establishing a space for transition within which to develop the necessary conditions for disruptive and paradoxical elements to be elaborated. However, crisis care in the context studied here proved to be hampered by infrastructure issues, institutional rigidity, and fragmentation of activities, with little orientation towards inter-sector work.
Mental Health Services; Social Support; Adolescent
