The Fabric of Mental Health. Medical Power, Secularity, and the Psychotherapeutic Field in Portugal

Period
October 15, 2014 to January 31, 2019
Duration
52 months
Abstract

This project aims to improve historical and sociological knowledge on the field of Mental Health, a structuring element of contemporary societies understood as sets of social practices and knowledge constellations.
In Portugal, the notion of Mental Health emerged in the 1940s in response to the directives of the World Health Organization and in the context of the consolidation of psychiatry. In the 1960s, it was rearticulated in the process of the creation of non‐psychiatric psychotherapeutic careers (e.g. psychologists and social workers). Since the 1980s it has been a central topic of public health policies, with the 1990s signaling an attempted shift from the psychiatric hospital centred model to one characterized by the integration of Mental Health rationales in general hospitals and the development of care networks. In this period, Mental Health gained new meanings as a result of the interrelated changes in epidemiological practices and governmentality patterns, and the emergence of a diversity of therapeutic spiritualities. Eventually Mental Health became a cultural idiom in western secular worlds observable in the actual fabric of social interactions.

Outcomes

Expected Impact:

- a thick account of the social history of psychiatry, allowing a better understanding of current epistemic, ethical and institutional transformations in the context of global Mental Health
- contributing to a more reflexive epidemiology, combining quantitative methods and qualitative approaches
-  a greater visibility of the experience of mental illness, with a focus on depression, in view of the social empowerment and inclusion of patients / service users
- a better understanding of the politics and culture of happiness and their links to secularity and the market of therapeutic spiritualities

Researchers
Ana Filipa Queirós
David Soares
Sílvia Damásio
Tiago Pires Marques (coord)
Keywords
psychiatrists, psychiatric hospitals, psychotherapies, experiences of mental illness, concepts of mental health
Funding Entity
Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology