O diagnóstico de autismo: impasses e desafios na transmissão à famíla

Abstract

This research arises from a concern with diagnoses of autism in infancy, especially with the way in which they are made and transmitted by health professionals to family members, since this diagnosis is not always clear. In many cases, does not differentiate from childhood psychosis. Moreover, the way the diagnosis is transmitted to the family can cause intense suffering and helplessness, which can generate exclusion of the child and helplessness, which can generate exclusion and difficulties in treating children. Starting with this issue, we studied the process of diagnosing children with signs of autism, performed at the Psychosocial Care Center of Children and Adolescents (CAPSi) in the Metropolitan Region of Recife, considering the way the diagnosis is made, its transmission and the potential impact on family. For this purpose, we use fundamentally the theoretical of Winnicott and the relation with the contributions of other authors to discuss the issue. Although Winnicott not have a theory about autism, and our goal is not to outline a discussion of etiology, their formulations on the theory of maturation and infant mental health serves as a beacon the debate. The field research was qualitative in nature, and performed a semistructured interview with 07 (seven) health professionals responsible for diagnosing the institution and three (03) mothers who had already gone through the evaluation process. The analysis of data took into account the Technical by Minayo (1996), which has three fundamental moments: pre-analysis, material exploration and treatment of the results obtained from the considerations of Winnicott, without losing sight of the objectives of the research. Though this research it is a very narrow cut mental health a public institution, its discussion is representative of issues that affect the health system in general, because what is at issue is the theoretical insight, technical, methodological and social policy-overlapping clinical practice of professionals involved in the diagnosis of autism.