Quarantine Anxiety: Governmentality Strategies for Anxious Subjects During the Covid-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

The numbers of mental disorders, such as pathological anxiety, almost doubled in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide. This fact, in turn, demands specific medical-psychiatric intervention strategies, with digital technologies as the main means of therapeutic articulation. Paying attention to this scenario, this research seeks to investigate the modes of governmentality for the anxious subject in the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2020, in the Brazilian scenario. Methodologically, the archgenealogy bias of a qualitative nature is adopted, having as corpus three materialities, one from Canal Drauzio Varela and two from Vittude Blog, analyzed in the light of Foucault’s postulates. In short, social media offers a virtual environment that, even in the midst of isolation, articulates the government of itself and the other through information publications, online therapies, among others.

KEYWORDS:
Covid-19; Anxious body; Virtual social media.; Biopolitical strategies; Self-constitution