The Reality of the Public Assistance System for the Elderly: A Psychosocial Overview of Brasilia Metropolitan Region

Abstract

The care service to the elderly community in the metropolitan region of Ceilândia has been the subject of social discussions about the precariousness and lack of public resources to meet the region's quantity. In this scenario, we investigated the reality of long-term public and private institutions and religious institutes, in order to verify the preventive and palliative actions of the physical, psychic, social and emotional care system. It was observed that the elderly of long-term services in public institutions had contradictory feelings of well-being and psychological distress, to the detriment of the feeling of loneliness and abandonment by the absence of family in their daily lives and precariousness of the services offered. In contrast, the elderly in private and religious institutions verbalize the feeling of emptiness caused by the daily living of family members, but the recreational and social activities keep them alive and emotionally stable. This work is relevant for the elderly community in understanding social bottlenecks, within the legal right of the elderly, in guaranteeing rights to housing, food and housing. The objective was to present an overview of the practical perspective of the actions of welcoming, recreation and rest of the elderly in situations of vulnerability and social risk in the institutional context, since family abandonment is one of the causes that affect physical and psychosocial health, triggering diseases. like anxiety and depression. From the social point of view, the discussion of public social assistance policies regarding the care service to the elderly community is fundamental, given that the Brazilian population is aging, and this theme has been neglected by the responsible public health agencies. . For the scientific community, the study is significant as a guide for future research in the social area. It is a descriptive and exploratory research about the investigated field.