Meditação como uma prática integrativa e complementar no enfrentamento do adoecimento mental : uma contribuição para o serviço social

Abstract

In the 21st century, mental illness has become a public health issue. It is caused by several factors. Its forms of manifestation are explained based on the definitions of mental disorders, such as anxiety, which is very common in society today. Anxiety disorder (AD) affects the world population and, mainly, Brazilian society, which is one of the countries with the most anxious people in the world, even before the pandemic period. As a complementary alternative for the management of mental illness processes, such as anxiety disorder, there are Integrative and Complementary Practices (ICPs), which were officially recognized in health establishments in Brazil based on the National Policy of Integrative and Complementary Practices (PNPIC), which currently has 29 rationalities or therapeutic resources, including the practice of meditation. Based on this, the general objective of this work was to conduct a survey of the literature on scientific publications about the use of meditation as an integrative and complementary practice in coping with mental illness. To this end, bibliographic searches were carried out in the PubMed and Scielo databases, using the keywords anxiety; anxiety disorder; Meditation and using the inclusion criteria of having been published between 2014 and 2024 and being a clinical trial. In addition to the bibliographic searches, there were also documentary searches on government websites, reports and world documents. With the established criteria, 41 studies were selected to be worked on in this research. As results, the following scores stand out: 29 articles present statistically significant differences in meditation in reducing anxiety, confirming the hypothesis that this integrative practice can contribute to coping with mental illness. From this, we intend to collaborate with the dissemination of knowledge about the evidence of its effectiveness in coping with mental illness, in addition to contributing to the process of valuing new practices in collective health, based on culture and ancestral knowledge as a form of decoloniality, which goes against Eurocentric knowledge. Constituting a reflection on epistemology based on the deconstruction of the colonial perspective, since it has as a perspective the experience and knowledge of others, historically excluded. Therefore, this work is motivated by the questioning and criticism of the capitalist logic of knowledge production.