Bioethics and Indigenous Mental Health: Interculturality or Integrationism?

Abstract

This research seeks to analyze how psychological practice constructs its bioethical limits in interventions in indigenous communities, taking into consideration, the eugenic and colonial history of the Brazilian State and the profession. We will discuss how the encounter between different cultures can take on a character of domination by nonindigenous professionals, since psychological knowledge is still permeated by Eurocentric theories and practices, which barely cover what indigenous mental health is and its complex subjectivities. This way, we will outline Brazil's colonial past and how it contributes to the current erasure of the original collective subject in mental health discussions. Furthermore, bibliographical research by indigenous health researchers was used to address the constitutional and political measures responsible for creating laws, guidelines and institutions that ensure the rights and access of indigenous populations to differentiated health. Based on the definitions of what health and illness are in the original worldviews, a parallel is drawn up to the need for bioethical psychological action based on the principle of autonomy, since it is essential to establish limits for the interventions of nonindigenous psychologists, who they are distant from traditional realities and, therefore, must assume a position of listening and learning in line with the cultural parameters of the people in question.