THE HEALTH PROMISED TO WOMEN IN PSYCHOLOGICAL EXHAUSTION

Abstract

The psychic exhaustion of women cannot be understood merely as an individual or clinical problem: it is a social phenomenon that reflects a culture that systematically harms precisely those on whom the daily sustenance of life depends. The historical naturalization of gender inequalities, combined with the structural precarization of labor and the invisibilized overload of care, produces a form of wear that goes beyond the organic dimension of the individual body and exposes a social model that consumes more than it restores. In Brazil, although the Unified Health System (SUS) is the largest public health system in the world and the Constitution guarantees health as a universal right, women arrive at services already depleted, carrying the marks of violence and neglect, and often encounter fragmented responses restricted to biomedical rationality. This article, based on a literature review and supported by sociological and anthropological frameworks of health, analyzes how this institutional promise of care becomes a frustrated promise. The scenario reveals not only individuals in suffering, but also a society that turns the female gender into a privileged target of stigmatization and exploitation. In this sense, it is argued that confronting women’s mental exhaustion requires shifting the debate beyond individual responsibility and recognizing care as a political task and a collective responsibility, indispensable to building a less unequal and less harmful society.