From local production to international mental healthcare cooperation: building care and learning networks between Brazil and Italy

The challenges faced in international mental healthcare cooperation include overcoming colonizing proposals through situated and horizontal practices. The Third Space Theory’s decolonial concept fosters the construction of hybrid notions, situated learning, and mutual transformations between countries. The objective was to report an international mental healthcare cooperation experience between Brazil and Italy through a qualitative, cooperative, and ethnographic research of a virtual community of practice. Interactions among Brazilian and Italian managers, professionals, users, family members, and community members were analyzed on NVivo, resulting in imageries, contradictions, and powers of mental healthcare in both countries. The transformations that occurred in the exchanges enabled to build, rebuild, and break rooted identities about the other country; identify singularities and similarities; and create and reaffirm paths that value the psychiatric reform’s principles.