O louco mundo da ficção: um estudo sobre a representação social da esquizofrenia na telenovela

Abstract

The media, especially television, are widely consumed by the Brazilian public. Among its products, the soap opera gets the greatest reverberation, also being recognized as one of the main commodities of the entertainment industry. To generate empathy and identi- fication among its public, the Brazilian soap opera appropriates existing social represe n- tations in society, while at the same time they change a bit some other social represent a- tions. A look back reveals that madness has been a frequent theme in these plots; how- ever, madness has never deserved much attention. The approach tends to be superficial, with the sole intention of making people laugh or cry. Nevertheless, in 2009, Caminho das Índias elected schizophrenia - a mental disorder most often associated with madness - as the focus of a social campaign, and it sought to present the disorder didactically to the public as a treatable disease. This study corpus elected eight (8) sequences of the soap opera in question composed of scenes that last for at least 1 minute and are directly or indirectly related to schizophrenia. The methodology employed the analysis of the images, considering them as a text composed by both the script, for editing, track, direc- tion, staging and all other scenic elements