Mental health in the Tupinambá community of Serra do Padeiro, southern Bahia, Brazil: community and struggle as sources of health

Abstract

This work presents concepts and practices linked to mental health in the Tupinambá Indigenous community of Serra do Padeiro in southern Bahia, Brazil. This qualitative cartographic research mapped existing processes and relationships in the Tupinambá territory. Data production techniques were participant observation, semi-structured interviews, field diary, and bibliographic studies. Shared responsibility characterizes how Indigenous medicine care is organized in the territory. The factors that produce psychosocial distress, care practices, and conflict coping are understood from the interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of care. The inseparability between psychic and social is combined with territorial dimensions, reinforcing the link between mental health and daily community life. The struggle for territory enables the reconstruction of a subjective ethos that refuses servitude, moving from previous conditions of precariousness and subalternity, with expulsion from the territory to other more autonomous and collective subjectivation processes. The example of Serra do Padeiro highlights that the struggle offers the most significant health.

Key words:
Mental Health; Indigenous Populations; Ethnic Violence; Social Cohesion