Comprehensive analysis of a mental health promotion programme: the community mental health group

Abstract

The health and mental health fields alike have been undertaking significant transformations since the 1970's, changing their settings in order to promote an universal, comprehensive, and humanized care to the population, inspiring the guidelines of the mental health psycho-social care mode. The group practice being a valued mechanism under this framework. The Community Mental Health Group is developed within the psycho-social and group context, since 1997, putting together practice and scientific investigation. It is an open modality of mental health promotion and care through the attention to daily experiences. This study aims to understand the Community Mental Health Group through the phenomenological analysis of the group sessions. More specifically, it aims to describe and understand: the meaning of the experiences brought by the participants, the role of the coordinator in elaborating such experiences, the group process, the group therapeutic potential, and possible challenges to the modality. For such, a qualitative research approach, from the epistemological and methodological foundations of the Classic Phenomenology will be adopted. Eight audio recorded and thoroughly transcribed group sessions will be initially analysed. Each session will be individually analysed, in the search for the main aspects of the CMHG within the singular context of each one of them. Secondly, from the comparative analysis of the set of sessions, meaning units will be constituted aiming to put together structuring aspects of studied object, the Community Mental Health Group. The pathway will be gone through by the adoption of phenomenological attitude towards the material, from a descriptive, reflexive, and comprehensive posture towards the phenomena being shown. This study may contribute to the scientific literature of groups and mental health care, through an empirical, qualitative and systematic study of the group sessions from a mental health care intervention inspired by the psycho-social principles of care. (AU)