SILVA, Mariana de Abreu Barbosa Pereira da    PERES, Rodrigo Sanches. The collective imaginary of community health agents about users of mental health. []. , 13, 2, pp.55-65. ISSN 1806-2490.

Community Health Agents (CHAs) provide an essential link between health care teams and the community in the context of Primary Health Care, including mental health care. The aim of the present study was to understand the collective imaginary of a group of CHAs about users of mental health. The participants were six CHAs, all female, in this job for, at least, four years. The locus for data collection was a psychoanalytic discussion group developed in four meetings. The corpus was consisted by the transcripts of the meetings and was analyzed qualitatively using psychoanalytic interpretation as a methodological procedure in order to facilitate the identification of latent meanings. Basically, the results show that the collective imaginary of the participants about mental health users was marked by ambivalence defined by the coexistence of feelings of fear and commiseration.

: Collective Imaginary; Health Professionals; Mental Health; Community Mental Health; Public Health.

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