COVID-19 PANDEMIC: SANITARY AND PSYCHOSOCIAL CATASTROPHE

Abstract

The speed of the COVID-19 pandemic and the inability of health systems to respond in time trigger a health crisis that highlights the interdependence between environmental, economic, social, cultural and political processes. This essay seeks to demonstrate the importance of the relationship between the psychic reality and the external reality in this health and social crisis. We analyze some of its conditions and manifestations, focusing on paradoxes and tensions that stand out, particularly, in two areas: a) in the sociability patterns and modes of representation of the individual in society, highlighting the paradox of the imaginary formation of the individualized individual, supposedly autonomous, powerful and capable of self-management, vis-à-vis the growing awareness of their lack of knowledge, lack of control and inability to save themselves in the pandemic, as well as the recognition of structural inequalities in society, illuminated by the reflectors of the pandemic; b) within the scope of public health services and the daily lives of its professionals, the paradox of the precarious historical situation of the Unified Health System (SUS), predominantly represented by the media, until then, as ineffective, and its sudden imaginary promotion to the salvationist place of depository of hopes and, therefore, deserving of the investments that it has lacked since its creation. Finally, we discussed the pandemic COVID-19 as a psychosocial catastrophe, resulting from the overlap and interpenetration of health and social catastrophes, as an external reality, to the internal (psychic) ​​reality of the subjects and we point out the importance, for the possible reconfigurations of society in the post-pandemic, of a collective work on and by the word, in narratives that aim at the (re) construction of meanings about the horror that we now live.