Pathologisation, Depathologisation and Mental Health: Keys for a Contemporary Discussion from Ibero-America

This book examines the pathologisation and depathologisation of mental health in Ibero-América. It highlights the possibilities and the epistemic limits of the interpretative models of pathos that have legitimised mental health pathologies. Further, it proposes a rereading of psychopathology and analyses the clinical, philosophical, ontological, ethical, psychological and anthropological consequences of this.

Across ten chapters it brings together academics from Latin America with colleagues from Europe, Asia and North America to address issues including stigma, aesthetics, childhood, gender, migration, political public or social networks and their relationship with mental health. Section 1 brings critical psychology into dialogue with psychiatry, sociology, philosophy and psychoanalysis to review the conceptual frameworks through which ＂pathology＂ has been understood in ＂psy＂ discourses. Section 2 presents a range of case studies that demonstrate the impact of debates around the pathologisation and de-pathologisation on mental health care in various populations across Latin American.

It will offer fresh insights to practitioners, as well as to students and scholars working in the areas of mental health, critical psychology, medical sociology, Latin American studies, psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

Raudelio Machín Suárez, is a psychologist and holds a doctorate from the University of Havana, Cuba. He currently serves as an Associate Professor and Director of the Master’s program in Psychopathology and Mental Health at the Faculty of Education and Social Sciences at Andrés Bello University in Chile. He has published several books, including Integration in Psychotherapy: Birth and Death of a Myth (1998), Epistemological Causes of the Dominance of Positivism in Educational Research (2010), Cuban Political Imaginary (2011), Organicity of Youth Political Movements (2014), New Waves in Social Psychology (2021), and more than twenty articles in indexed scientific journals.