Capoeira as a treatment and prevention method with mental disorders; Play with me!
Goran Gumze
Alma Mater Europaea - European Center Maribor, Slovenia
: J Regen Med
Abstract
This chapter is the result of the unplanned part of my anthropological fieldwork in Salvador Bahia between 2005 and 2007. As an anthropologist with no prior medical knowledge, I did not expect to get the opportunity to work in a psychiatric hospital. I embarked on my fieldwork doubtful as to whether I would be able to collect enough clinical data on depressive disorders – one cannot walk into a hospital and ask for patient data without the necessary licences and application forms. However, at the occupational therapy unit of the CENA mental health centre at the Juliano Moréira Hospital they were looking to reintroduce capoeira, which had not been on the programme for some time but had previously yielded positive therapeutic results in the treatment process. The teacher who had held the therapy sessions had left for Europe at the end of 2003 and therefore, they had only had occasional therapists. The head of the centre explained to me that very few capoeira teachers and masters were prepared to work at psychiatric hospitals, because the work is either voluntary or very poorly paid, because the majority of them did not find the work to represent a sufficient challenge (they were aware that the therapy process would not produce good capoeiristas or consequently their successors who would be able to promote the master’s name or the group in the wider Salvador society or worldwide), and finally because mental illness bears the same stigma in Salvador as it does in most societies.
Biography
E-mail: goran.gumze@almamater.si
