title: [Mental health care strategies in primary health care units].
abstract: This study is aimed at getting to know mental health care strategies in Primary Health Care Services, and how those services are structured to provide care for users undergoing psychic suffering in a region of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Semistructured interviews were conducted with the managers of five Primary Health care units. These interviews were classified according to thematic content analysis. The results show that Primary Health Care Units have similar strategies of providing mental health care getting and referring patients according to their flow. There are difficulties in the configuration of the network among the different health services in the region, because of barriers that have to be overcome in order to have access to specialized care. This fact leads to psychiatric episodes and oftentimes users have to be brought to emergency services creating a breech in the provision of global and permanent health care.
authors.affiliation: Laboratório do Departamento de Enfermagem Materno Infantile Psiquiátrica da Escola de Enfermagem da Universidade de São Paulo (EEUSP), São Paulo, Brasil.
authors.forename: Juliana Reale
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Caçapava
authors.forename: Luciana de Almeida
authors.initials: Lde A
authors.lastname: Colvero