Camila Kfouri was a Sao Paulo psychologist and psychoanalyst who treated access to mental health care as a civic project, not a private luxury. She was also an audiovisual producer and a DJ of Brazilian music, moving between consulting rooms, public clinics, film sets, and dance floors with the same insistence that listening should be available to more people.
She was the only daughter among the four children of sports journalists Juca Kfouri and Leda Kfouri. Friends and patients knew a discreet professional who kept a low social-media profile under the handle @camilakf while building a dense network of clinical colleagues. Her father later wrote that childhood trauma shaped a long medical struggle: at age six she saw her paternal grandfather, retired prosecutor Carlos Alberto Gouvea Kfouri, shot during a robbery at the family door. He died after eleven days in hospital in 1985. Juca described sequelae that followed her for decades, including adrenal dysfunction, bariatric surgery, compulsive eating, and diabetic neuropathy. He called her Camiloca, Cam, and Joaninha, and said that on 26 October 2026 the last victim of that day finally did not resist.
Professionally she trained as a psychologist and worked as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. She was a member of the Laboratory of Studies on Violence and Social Vulnerability at Universidade Mackenzie and of the Clinica Publica de Psicanalise before that clinic closed. In the first half of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, a patient from Sao Paulo's Ocupacao 9 de Julho asked where other residents with serious mental-health needs could go. Existing free psychoanalysis groups she trusted could not absorb the demand. In an essay published by the Departamento de Psicanalise do Sedes in March 2021, Camila wrote that if no solution existed, they would have to invent one. That invention became Clinica da Cidade - Psicanalise Publica.
She gathered colleagues from Sedes, the former public clinic, CEP, and the Forum do Campo Lacaniano, asked Moises Rodrigues to supervise because of his work on state violence, and built the group week by week on Zoom before opening virtual doors. The clinic offered ongoing individual sessions, an open online grief group called Luto a Distancia for people who could not hold traditional wakes, and Mutirao de Escuta single-session consultations. Camila framed psychoanalysis as something that could and should become public policy: a right to be heard in a country she described as threatened by anti-intellectualism and the devastation of science. O Globo later highlighted that she also created a Spotify playlist of Brazilian music for isolation, extending care through sound as well as speech.
Before and beside clinical work she produced at Conspiracao Filmes and worked as a DJ focused on Brazilian repertoire. On the left-leaning NOCAUTE platform associated with Fernando Morais she debuted as a video essayist and commentator, arguing against despair, against treating harassment as mere sex rather than power, against quantifying whose lives count, and against the hollowing of public universities. Those short films gave her a public voice that matched the clinic's ethics: political, affectionate, impatient with resignation.
She died in Sao Paulo on 26 October 2026, aged 48. The cause was not formally disclosed beyond her father's account of long illness. Wake and cremation took place the next day at Cerimonial Pacaembu and Crematorio Vila Alpina. Artist Rita Wainer, a friend of thirty-one years, mourned her on Instagram. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva posted condolences to Juca on X. Corinthians supporters later marked her as part of the club's grieving community. What remains most clearly is the clinic she helped invent so that a city under quarantine, and people without money for private analysis, could still find an ear.
