“Stop suffering!”: Universal Church discourses on depression through the covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to understand how depression during the covid-19 pandemic has been discoursed by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (IURD, in portuguese). It seeks to identify which understandings about depression and cure emerge in these discourses. For this purpose, we took as object of analysis the texts from the News section of the IURD portal. For the survey and analysis of the corpus, we used procedures from the content analysis proposed by Bardin (1977), so that the sample was then analyzed discursively (FOUCAULT, 1971, 2008, 2010). The analysis was based on studies by Dunker (2021) about current psychic suffering and its relationship with neoliberalism (DARDOT, LAVAL, 2016; BROWN, 2019). The results indicate that depression is discussed by the IURD as a spiritual problem, which is cured through faith, endorsing self-responsibility as an imperative to obtain results, in line with certain neoliberal discourses.

Keywords
Universal Church; depression; psychic suffering; neoliberalism; covid-19