Immigration in Brazilian medical and psychiatric discourse in the post-Second World War period.

The article analyzes the contributions of psychiatry to the debate on health and immigration in the post-Second World War, when Brazil received war refugees and displaced persons from Eastern Europe. The concern with mental disorders attributed to war traumas made mental health a topic of debate in the specialized press. From the analysis of medical articles published in the journals Arquivos Brasileiros de Higiene Mental and Arquivos Brasileiros de Neuriatria e Psiquiatria and in Revista de Imigração e Colonização, we seek to understand the relevance of immigration as a field in which psychiatrists took action and vied for legitimacy as authorities in the preparation of Brazil's immigration policies.

[A reading of gender: representations of normality in the magazine Vamos Ler!, 1936-1948].

This research note is the result of an investigation into the circulation of normality as a category of mental health among the lay population. Based on the hypothesis that the appropriation of discourse from medical categories is marked by a polyphony of meanings and not by homogeneity, this project analyzed the variety magazine Vamos Ler! (1936-1948), which featured active participation by its readers in correspondence sections. The subjectivity contained in the letters published in the magazine reveals that the medical discourse was not hegemonic in the lay definition of normality, emphasizing the presence of other discourses (including the experiences of individual readers) which assumed the condition of truth in constructing representations of normal men and women.