Prevention On Mental Health in Brazil: A Comprehensive Systematic Review

The goal of this paper is to identify the state of the art research on mental health prevention in Brazil from the perspective of literature. Thus, were developed a conceptual review and two sequential studies. The review presents mains concepts and theoretical assumptions related to prevention on mental health. The results of the study indicated conceptual and practical gains with the expansion of the definition of mental health and prevention. These were associated with well-being, positive psychology and the possibility of discussion of risk factors and protective from the Bioecological Model of Human Development. The first study was a systematic review on the state of the art of national survey in mental health prevention and analyzed the studies on phases of the research in prevention. The research´s cycle of prevention can be described in big six main steps: identifying the problem, the location and protective and risks factors, the test pilot of preventive intervention, the efficacy test, the effectiveness test and the dissemination. In addition, 4131 articles were located. Of these, 651 (15.76%), were studies of mental health prevention. In this category, the most prevalent occurrence was about exploratory and theoretical studies (256 articles, 68.45%). Were identified only 31 articles (8.29%) describing programs and only 2.94% (11 articles) of them were systematically evaluated. The second study was a systematic review of the characteristics of preventive interventions evaluated systematically identified in the previous study, increased by the new interventions localized in the literature, beyond the identification of Brazilian´s research centers that develop preventive interventions. Were analyzed the characteristics of 42 systematic interventions identified in 25 articles. National interventions are characterized by long, with a small number of subjects, held weekly, and were aimed at teaching skills. Among the studies evaluated 84% did not undergo follow-up and 88% did not discussed the relevance of the results for public policy. The analysis of research centers indicated that Brazilian researchers are mostly psychologists affiliated with public institutions of the southeastern in Brazil. The results of this work indicate the discontinuity of transforming basic research into preventive interventions and technologies, the lack of interlocution between academic research and public policy, the need for investment in measures of assessment and partnership with various knowledge areas, so that programs could be disseminated on a large scale.