TAKING CARE OF THOSE WHO EDUCATE

TEACHER’S MENTAL HEALTH CONDITIONS

Abstract

The text addresses the importance of self-care in teachers' mental health and its connections with teaching work. It presents an experience lived in a municipal school in the Early Childhood Education network. Aiming to recognize and support the mental health of teachers as an attribute for the quality of personal and professional teaching life. The perspective is to expand the educational institutional perspective on mental health as a possibility of producing forms of self-care in the work environment. The research methodology is qualitative, enabling the topography of teachers' mental health care relationships. The data collected from the analysis of the narratives of the teachers interviewed points to a relationship between the quality of mental health in educational spaces and the attitude of care taken by teachers regarding their mental health. Thus, given the diagnosis provided by the topography of health research in the school context, the need to create spaces for dialogue about psychopathologies and ways to promote mental health in educational spaces in favor of life and quality of mental health through self-care emerges.