QUANDO A POLÍTICA NÃO ALCANÇA O SUJEITO: Os desafios da implementação do programa Pró-Vida no contexto neoliberal e suas reverberações na saúde mental do policial militar

Abstract

This dissertation critically analyzes the implementation of the National Program for Quality of Life for Public Security Professionals (Pró-Vida) within the framework of the Unified Public Security System, with emphasis on its repercussions for the mental health of military police officers in the contemporary neoliberal context. The study is based on the assumption that the formal existence of public policies does not, in itself, ensure their effectiveness as social rights, considering policy implementation as a political, institutional, and bureaucratic process shaped by rationalities, disputes, and power relations. The research adopts a qualitative, analytical, and critical approach, grounded in bibliographic review and documentary analysis of normative frameworks, programs, and institutional arrangements related to public security policy and mental health. The theoretical framework articulates contributions from the literature on public policy implementation, bureaucracy, and neoliberalism, drawing on authors such as Max Weber, Dardot and Laval, David Harvey, Amartya Sen, Erving Goffman, Christophe Dejours, and Richard Sennett, among others. The findings indicate that the implementation of the Pró-Vida Program occurs in a selective, fragmented, and episodic manner, conditioned by bureaucratic constraints, weak interinstitutional coordination, the absence of robust mechanisms for participation and social control, and subordination to the neoliberal logic of managing distress. The analysis shows that the policy tends to operate more as an instrument for administering the effects of psychological suffering than as a structural strategy to guarantee the right to mental health, producing a gap between legal norms and the concrete experience of military police officers. It is concluded that the limitations of the Pró-Vida Program stem less from its normative formulation and more from the institutional conditions of its implementation, reinforcing the need to strengthen workers’ participation, administrative accountability, and the reorientation of mental health policies in the field of public security as a collective responsibility of the State.