Collective mental health and transnational care. Challenges and defiances

Abstract

It is raised by a reflection about the international migration starting on the proximity of this social and political phenomenon with the forced displacement in the framework of Colombia’s armed conflict. Specifically on this interjection’s point it is located the experience of “living in foreign land” and their implications for the world of relations, emotions and affections, for mental health. Those reflections have their empirical bases on investigation and accompaniment process to rural communities affected by the armed conflict for the strengthening of community care and collective mental health with the active participation of communities. This process has allowed highlight a collective mental health, with fundament on the relational, historical, and political; also being able to transform the social aspect, in contrast of individualist mental health, functionalistic and centered in sickness. From this perspective it is exposed the notions of “social suffering”, “ethic- political suffering” or “social humiliation”, “territory, territoriality, and place” and “transnationals cares” in their correlation with mental health –collective– from a perspective of human rights in migration cases. It is proposed an epistemic turn towards the collective mental health and their proposal of a historic- social subject, esthetic and politics that actively participates in the inventions of the new life’s forms, which is the starting point in the mental health care’s reorientation.