Do desejo à travessia: vivências acadêmicas e saúde mental de jovens universitários do interior do Amazonas

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the mental health experience of university students from the interior of Amazonas who migrated to the capital to continue their higher education. It starts from the understanding of the university as a space of multiple meanings, in which academic, social, cultural, and subjective dimensions are articulated, traversed by processes of adaptation, displacement, and the construction of new life projects. Considering the regional, cultural, and geographical specificities of the Amazon, this study has the general objective of understanding how academic experiences constitute the mental health experience of these students, and the specific objectives are: 1- To know the life history of the research participants; 2- To understand the structure of functioning and organization of the University as an objective/subjective context for the academic experiences narrated by the research participants; 3- To identify the main academic experiences reported by the research participants; 4- To understand how academic experiences are signified in relation to the mental health experience by the research participants. When considering mental health, we start from the conception that it is constructed at the intersection between subjective processes and social determinants of health, being influenced by social, economic, political, cultural, and territorial conditions that permeate the trajectories of individuals. This is a qualitative, exploratory research study, developed from a multiple case study design. Three female university students from the interior of Amazonas, enrolled at the Federal University of Amazonas, participated; their trajectories involved moving to the capital to continue their higher education. Data collection occurred through individual conversational interviews, guided by topic guides, in light of the assumptions of qualitative epistemology. Data analysis was performed using thematic analysis, from which four major discussion themes were constructed: 1) From desire to journey: educational project and displacements; 2) University as a structured and lived space; 3) Academic experiences: routines, challenges, and discoveries; 4) Academic experiences and mental health. The narratives suggest that, for the participants, "mental health" is not reduced to the binary between illness and non-illness; it is an experience traversed by social determinants, by institutional daily life, and by the fabric of relationships built in the university environment. Thus, we perceive that, for the presence of young people from the interior of Amazonas to take place in the university, there is always a constitutive triangle: desire as the driving force, the journey as a gesture, and the meanings produced as a way of remaining. The participants' narratives indicate that living at university is inhabiting a continuous process, never fully fixed. An experience that moves between achievements, fatigue, discoveries, and reinventions.