Saúde mental dos profissionais da saúde em tempos de pandemia da COVID-19: revisão narrativa de literatura

Abstract

Introduction: at the end of 2019, in the city of Wuhan, China, the first cases of infection by Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, appears and since then the world has witnessed the growth of the most recent pandemic experienced by humanity. it has infected more than 106,617,679 people worldwide and killed more than 2,330,065. The virus has great transmission power, which causes many people to become ill at the same time, overloading health services and making professionals in the area susceptible to mental illness. Objective: To understand the social and psychological conditions in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic that favor the mental illness of health professionals through a narrative literature review. Method: a narrative literature review was carried out using keywords such as SARS-COV-2, covid-19, mental health, health worker, coronavirus. Results: There was a predominance of Brazilian works, reflection publications, pre-prints, opinion or editorials and addressing the psychological illness of health professionals in general. The main aspects involved in the workers' psychic vulnerability were the fear of contamination of themselves and their families, lack of PPE and overwork. Social and psychological support, visibility at work and support networks for health professionals were the main proposals found as a way of coping with the vulnerability found. Conclusion: The pandemic evidenced the destruction of the Brazilian public health system and the generic term health professionals does not reflect the reality of the different categories of workers in the area. The predominance of Brazilian studies seems to reflect the choice for qualitative studies in this review. The lack of studies prior to the pandemic that address social support for workers reveals the lack of mental health care for this category, which is aggravated by the resistance of professionals themselves to receive psychological support.