Subjective Dimensions of the Psychoactive Substance Addiction Experience of the São Carlos Psychossocial Attention Center users

• Grant number: 24/09032-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2024
• End date: July 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Social Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Luciana Nogueira Fioroni
• Grantee: Pedro de Oliveira Fernandes da Silva
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The consumption of psychoactive substances reaches across the constitution of humanity, changing from a form of altering states of consciousness to a way of handling uneasiness. Due to its intoxicating potencial, a group of collective health issues has risen around the drug matter. This made necessary the creation of specialized attention strategies that dispose of adequate care techniques to cater for the user's mental health demands, and that were materialized on the CAPSad and the harm reduction model. Nonetheless, considering that substance addiction is built upon the interaction of psychosocial determinants of health and the unconscious structure of the relation that the user sets with the substance, a essentially singular process is established and must be treated as such. Therefore, the objective of this study is to investigate the subjective dimensions in the substance addiction experience of the CAPSad users in São Carlos. For this matter, this empirical and qualitative-interpretive health and social psychology research was created. It expects the participation of 12 users from CAPSad São Carlos through the usage of the McGill Illness Narrative Interview (MINI). The participants will also answer an addiction characterization questionnaire and a medical record analysis script will be applied on their files. The data obtained will go through a thematic analysis under the hermeneutic dialectic methodology. It is expected to find multiple configurations to the addiction situation, in which this process is maintained by the users' psychosocial determinants and the structure of their relation with the substance, outlining impacts on the individual's identity.