Boulos said that MTST helps fight depression – 09/30/2024 – Panel

Candidate for Mayor of São Paulo Guilherme Boulos (PSOL), who said he was hospitalized as a youth because of depression during the debate Sheet/UOL this Monday (30), worked as a hypothesis for his master’s thesis that participating in homeless occupations helps people improve from the disorder.

Boulos brought the hospitalization case to light after Pablo Marçal (PRTB) said in the debate that he would disclose information related to the psolista and Hospital do Servidor. Boulos then said that when he was 19 years old he was hospitalized for chronic depression.

“When he mentioned Hospital do Servidor, I realized his scam. I spent four or five days in the hospital because I faced a very severe depression. I underwent therapy, analysis, used medications prescribed by psychiatrists”, stated the candidate, adding that he will publish the medical records of hospitalization.

Boulos defended the dissertation “Study on the variation of depressive symptoms related to collective participation in homeless occupations in São Paulo” in 2017, at the age of 34, to obtain a master’s degree from the Psychiatry program at the Faculty of Medicine at USP.

In his work, he says that the research results confirmed the initial hypotheses, that is, that involvement in collective actions in occupations contributed to the remission of depressive symptoms. In the dissertation, he does not address his own experience with depression.

Boulos carried out his research with the Homeless Workers Movement, of which he was coordinator. He joined the group in 2002 and left the board when he took office in the Chamber, in 2023, according to his advisor.

At the conclusion of the dissertation, the psolist points out “therapeutic factors” in four moments of the experience of participating in occupations: the performance of the reception team upon arrival at the occupation, community coexistence in collective spaces, the responsibility arising from participation in tasks and “empowerment through participation in the group’s collective mobilizations”.

He states that it is possible to establish a relationship between high rates of depressive symptoms and greater loneliness and isolation among research participants. “And, conversely, increased social relationships are associated with decreased depressive symptoms.”

“The rescue of one’s own power — the antithesis of the feeling of impotence so characteristic of depressions — is perhaps the great subjective effect of a process of collective mobilization such as that provided by the occupations of the homeless movement”, writes Boulos in another excerpt of the dissertation.

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