Beyond Depression: Personal Equation from the Guilty to the Capable Individual

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to propose a sociological definition of mental health problems and practices. Due to the wide range of practices (from psychosis to self-help), this task is approached as a global idiom, enabling the formulation of multiple tensions and conflicts of contemporary modern life, and providing answers for acting on them—in the family, work and workplace, between couples, in education, etc. The centrality of emotional issues in our society can be described as a form of “mandatory expression” (Marcel Mauss), which characterizes an attitude toward contingency or adversity in a global context where autonomy is the supreme value. From this perspective, mental health can be seen as an individualistic way of dealing with what the ancients called the ‘passions’; it is the name individualistic society has given to what was referred to as the ‘passions’. Mental health is concerned with our ways of being affected by our ways of acting, and our ways of acting on these afflictions. A transversal viewpoint is presented, of which depression is only one aspect, at three intertwined levels of changes regarding: (1) the configuration of values and norms; (2) the concept of mental health; (3) the type of knowledge that dominates psychiatry and mental health fields, that is, the progressive replacement of psychoanalysis by cognitive neuroscience as the main type of knowledge of the human mind since the 1980s.