The disaster of Vale in Brazil: Mental Health and Psychosocial Care challenges for SUS

Abstract

On January 25th of 2019, Vale's River Dam ‘Corrego do Feijao’, located in the city of Brumadinho (MG), collapsed. It flooded the company's administrative area and the surrounding rural area, leaving bodies, personal belongings, memories and stories under the mud of ore tailings. The collapse of the dam was directly responsible for 249 deaths and left 137 people homeless. This article aims to relate the experience of implementing the strategy of Mental Health and Psychosocial Attention – SMPAS (in Portuguese) within the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS), considering the three levels of governance (Federal, State and Municipal), as well as all the stakeholders that took part on the strategy from the very first hours after the disaster until 6 months later. There were several challenges faced by the Health System given the new conjuncture, that combined: the intense suffering and the weight of the social-affective losses; the scarcity of financial resources and employment; the environmental consequences (still unknown, in terms of extension); the demand for resignifying the community’s identity. An articulated work between SUS, alongside with different sectors, such as education and social assistance, proved to be important and primordial, indicating the need to maintain these elements in SUS’ agenda.