Mental Illness of Female Nurses at Federal Public Hospitals in Brazil

This article uses a psycho-sociological approach. It presents the results of a study into nurses working at federally-run public hospitals in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who have suffered from mental illness and been granted medical leave of absencefor anxiety and/or depression. It describes the Brazilian hospital service with the aim of providing a background context for the research findings. The qualitative methodology employed constituted the content analysis of narratives of working lives. In-depth interviews were conducted with ten nurses aged 35 to 50. The main finding of the investigation link the nurses' suffering and mental illness to the socio-analytical category of "hierarchization of health care practices," which was broken down into four sub-categories: 1) formation of professional territories organized around medical knowledge; 2) power management in hospitals; 3) overvaluing of medical knowledge and undervaluing of nursing knowledge, and 4) highly competitive relationships in federal tertiary hospitals. The concluding statement is that the rigid hierarchization of the medical profession has an impact on hospital productivity.