Salud mental y ciudadanía. La composición de un nosotros

Abstract

The research developed deals with mental health and its scope beyond the classic link with the problems of psychiatry. The starting point for this, is that mental health has taken and converted daily life into its object of examination, producing specific knowledge about itself and daily experience, developing also unique strategies of action. Its greatest achievement has been to formalize and stabilize a relationship between health and daily life that is novel and distinguishes it from other traditions that have dealt with insanity, mental illness or behavioral deviations, as well as various therapies that at different times and in every culture have been developed around the manifestations of discomforts. In this way, mental health emerges as a specific project of a particular epoch and logic. From this, the object of this thesis lies precisely in a double movement that institutes, on the one hand, mental health in an ontological register different from that of mental illness, and on the other, that decentralizes its object from the field of health care and restores it in the set of social relations. From these point, the thesis try to go further and argue that mental health is not only an original composition that articulates everyday life with a notion of health, but is a technology that seeks to institute a subject that is thought to Itself as part of a universal subject that transcends the local. If psychiatric power deals with the excluded and marginalized, mental health deals with integration, how to do and what to do to form a subject that can be made in the image and likeness of that humanity invoked in the concept of world citizenship that emerged in the postwar period and that offers a vanishing point to think mental health no longer exclusively referred to mental problems, but involved especially in the production of a new citizenship, and with this, in a unique way of composing the social, that I have called the technologies of ourselves. I have chosen two paths to address these problems. One where it was sought through a genealogical perspective, to give an account of how mental health emerges as a specific field acquiring a singular and proper form, the other, where using an ethnographic approach, attempted to explore how this entity operates as a matrix of intelligibility of daily experience, affecting the lives of people to establish standardized ways of relating to oneself and others.