Systematic review about everyday life in Occupational Therapy English papers

The present study aims at identifying how the everyday life concept is used in the Occupational Therapy field in the English language literature and at making considerations in relation to the Brazilian literature on the subject. A systematic review of the international literature on the everyday life concept in the Occupational Therapy field was carried out and, from the results of this phase, reflections about the differences and similarities noticed in the use of this concept in the field of occupational therapy in Brazil are presented. Twenty articles selected from the CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) database were elected for analysis. This analysis found that English speaking authors, on the issue of everyday life rupture, focus on the assistance needed to help individuals to be able to perform their former occupations in an autonomous way. Besides, the way people live their everyday lives is an element that constitutes the person’s identity; people become what they are from their occupations. Everyday life is described in occupational terms; it is understood by the meaningful things people do in their lives. It is pointed out that, as opposed to the national literature, the international literature does not focus on the connection between everyday life and the social-political-cultural context. Thus, we discuss that the understanding about the contextualized everyday life is shared with Brazilian occupational therapists, and it has the potential to be presented as a construct on which the Brazilian contemporary occupational therapy identity is built.