Estilos da Clinica
ISSN 1415-7128 ISSN 1981-1624
JOIA, Julia Hatakeyama. Immigrant childhoods, silences and frontiers of care in a CAPS for children and adolescents. Estilos clin. []. 2021, 26, 1, pp.145-159. ISSN 1415-7128. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1981-1624.v26i1p145-159.
This article concerns mental health care among children from Bolivian families being attended at a Psychosocial Attention Care Center for Children and Youth in São Paulo. These children present difficulties in acquiring speech and developing social interaction and are referred principally by schools. The presentation of clinical vignettes will seek to articulate their trajectories to the context of immigration, the ruptures in family transmissions, their experiences of helplessness and the strategies they use to cope with the disqualified social position they occupy. The tendency to reduce the obstacles confronted by diagnosing such children as autistic is discussed. These children's and their families' silence is understood both as a result of the effects of the immigration context and as a form of resistance to cultural and identity submission.
: public mental health; Bolivian immigration; children; silencing.