[Access to first-person experience in research into mental health]. / Acesso à experiência em primeira pessoa na pesquisa em Saúde Mental.

This article presents and discusses the epistemological and methodological challenges related to the empirical study of first-person experience in mental health research. Considering the field of qualitative research, the methodological principles of phenomenology and medical anthropology are examined from a historical and conceptual perspective. The main operational concepts of the phenomenological method applied to empirical research, as well as their two main lines of approach, namely descriptive and psychological/transcendental phenomenology and hermeneutical or interpretative phenomenology, are described. The contributions of medical anthropology are studied especially with respect to the experience of illness and its forms of narrative. Lastly, considering the distinction between experience and narrative based on the theoretical benchmarks of phenomenology and medical anthropology, a more in-depth debate on access to first-person experience is conducted.

[Narratives in the study of mental health care practices: contributions of the perspectives of Paul Ricoeur, Walter Benjamin and of medical anthropology]. / Narrativas no estudo das práticas em saúde mental: contribuições das perspectivas de Paul Ricoeur, Walter Benjamim e da antropologia médica.

Narratives are ever more frequent in qualitative studies seeking to interpret experiences and the different viewpoints of individuals in a given context. Starting from this concept, the tradition that addresses narrative is reexamined, including the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, the historical perspective of Walter Benjamin and the field of medical anthropology grounded in phenomenology. In Ricoeur, with hermeneutics as a variation derived from phenomenology, narrative is linked to temporality. In Benjamin, narrative comprised of bits and pieces, always inconclusive, emerges in spite of the official stories. If Ricoeur retrieves tradition from Gadamer as a fundamental component for the construction of the world of a text that makes imitation of life possible, Benjamin, faced with the collapse of tradition, suggests the invention of narrative forms outside the traditional canons, making it possible to hark to the past in order to change the present. Assumptions of medical anthropology are also presented, as they consider narrative a dimension of life and not its abstraction, namely an embodied and situated narrative. Lastly, three distinct research projects in mental health that use narrative linked to the theoretical concepts cited with their differences and similarities are presented.