Mental illness in Mexico: A less visible challenge

Abstract

In psychology and psychiatry the term “mental illness” is used as if it was a clear concept, but is more illusory than accurate. It is wise to urgently relocate it as a concept because in recent decades, associated with its erratic use, semantic facts are included within the so-called “mental illness” which were neither detected nor resolved, let alone effectively prevented. It is a challenge faced with severe dimensions. The meaning attached to mental illness has been confined to conviviality and thinking problems, such as “mental health problems”, being predominantly non-functional human dimensions and require additional approaches to only the medical gaze. In this paper we present a brief review of the literature and some conceptual proposals, assuming that is necessary to face it with interdisciplinary work, less top-down, less fragmented between medicine and social sciences devoted to human existence.