A atividade de trabalho e o adoecimento psíquico em técnico-administrativos em educação

Abstract

The global issue faced by this study is centered on the psychic illness and the working activity of technical and administrative workers in education at Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio Grande do Norte (IFRN), in Brazil. This study is organized considering the perspective of Mental Health and Work, the theoretical references from the work clinics and the predominance of the Clinic of Activity theoretical approach. IFRN is a centenary Brazilian federal and public institution offering high-school, technical-professional formation and undergraduate free education, known by its quality. Considering that its administrators have observed a growing percentage of sickness absence caused by mental health issues among its workers, the current research aims to develop a descriptive analysis framed by the theoretical perspective of Clinic of Activity focusing IFRN’s technical and administrative workers who face psychic illness at work. This research aims to provide a socio-professional profile of the mentioned workers who have left work due to psychic illness; to verify the prevalence of common mental health disorders among them; to analyse the contexts of working activity which have made vulnerable their psychic health. The research has been divided in two studies: a quantitative one (Study 1) and a qualitative one (Study 2). The population of the current study was composed by 1123 workers in January, 2018. For the Study 1, data were collected through a socio-professional questionnaire and a Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20), which provide a description about the mental health through the common mental health disorders concept. Using the descriptive frequency analysis and the Chi-square/Fisher test, it was possible to verify the prevalence of 37% of common mental health disorders among the 434 respondents, as well as to verify the association between the dependent variable and some contextual variables (p < 0.05) such as: the extent of IFRN's expectations about the work activities developed by its technical and administrative workers; working conditions and organization; the assessment that work produces suffering; among other associations. The Study 2 has been centered on the analysis of the work activity of the studied workers who have been physically ill by their work, through the technique of the instruction to the double, derived from the approach of the Clinic of Activity. The Study 2 was developed with four volunteer workers, who work in different activities: a pedagogue, a student assistant, a laboratory assistant and a social worker. When analyzing the impediments of the activity, loss or amputation of the power to act was observed in all analyzed cases. It was verified that the studied technical and administrative workers in education do not make xv up a professional gender, but they are configured as a collective of workers, a collective that is fragmented and weakened, causing or increasing their psychic illness.