REFLEXÕES SOBRE PRÁTICAS PSI-JURÍDICAS NA TRIAGEM DA DEFENSORIA PÚBLICA PAULISTA

In this article, we presented some developments of the doctoral research in which were studied psycho-legal encounters at the Defensoria Pública do Estado de São Paulo (Public Defender’s Office of the State of São Paulo), taking the experience of the Centros de Atendimento Multidisciplinar (Multidisciplinary Assistance Centers – CAMs, acronym in Portuguese) as subject. Through a qualitative intervention-research methodology based on diaries and narrative construction, we have monitored professional practices involving the joint work of defenders, social workers and psychologists at the Public Defender’s Office, between 2011 and 2013. Here, we decided to focus on the triage, space where the first assistance to people who look for legal help is performed, which allowed us to get in contact with the management of requests and the way they become legal, non-legal and psycho-social demands. In order to do that, we used information from referral forms sent to a CAM in the years 2010 and 2011, along with situations experienced in the course of this research. The theoretical references of this study are Foucault’s thought and French Institutional Analysis. The triage showed that a traditional division between knowledges is utilized, which tends to (re)produce an “unintegrated” and disciplined legal assistance, providing a familialist mode of response to the problems presented by the population. However, mental health issues emerge as something that escapes divisions, producing shifts in the work process. We believe these ways of knowing-how-to-do generate a legal assistance that tends to be more oriented to comprehensive care, constituting an experience of thinking-knowing-doing between professions that does not submit to protocols and divisions already established