Some concepts of madness between traditional Psychiatry and Mental Health: Dialogues among the opposites? Psicologia USP

Abstract

This article presents part of the results of a bibliographical research on conceptions of madness in Psychiatry and in Mental Health. Publications in the LILACS database between 1999 and 2004 have been analyzed. The amplest research was conducted by thematic areas and, in the present article we have concentrated on two of them: publications that confirm conceptions of madness as medical illnesses; and publications that define madness by explicitly rejecting the psychiatric conception of madness, discussing madness with other conceptions which maintain a dialogue with the percipient objects (diagnostic descriptions) which Psychiatry has conceived throughout its history. These more recent conceptualizations, which are sometimes called alternative, but are in fact previous to the current conceptions of madness in Psychiatry (by considering it a genetic disorder, for instance), pointing to theoretical constructs that confirm a conception of mind, of the psychological, from a more individualized perspective to something resulting from social inter-relations. Finally, we discuss how these conceptions of madness are related to world conceptions (and, consequently, conceptions of the human being) that are distinct and even exclude each other, with a more naturalistic world vision in Psychiatry and a more sociological and collectivist vision in Mental Health, which have both been clashing beyond the scientific problems concerning madness.