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Historical Perspective on Mental Health: Emergence, Transformations of Subjectivity and Consequences in Clinical Practices

Received: 7 December 2022    Accepted: 23 December 2022    Published: 17 January 2023
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Abstract

Mental health has become a prolific field of research, concern, debate and intervention in the health sciences and human sciences in the last two decades. The fundamental interest of this brief history of the concept of mental health is to analyze the semantic and pragmatic configuration of the concept. There is a wide range of social uses of mental health. In the conditions of life of post-industrial capitalism since the Second World War, mental health has become a field of production of discourses and commodities addressed to the individual as coping templates, tools for self-understanding of their lives or mechanisms of meaning to overcome the difficulties of life. The event of mental health entails registers social events, socially mediated life experiences, cultural meanings, as well as capacities of agency over reality to the point of becoming a systematic articulation of human acts and contents of experience that ordered reality, therefore, it acquired the quality of a concept. Mental health is of relevance for historical work because it has left in its wake sources of various categories that require an exercise of compilation, systematization, reflection and narration. It is a reflexive concept for history: it reflects on experience, functions, practices and uses. It is part of what has been called the linguistic turn and the emotional turn, the awareness that both language and affective sensitivities sediment the understanding of the world. For this historiographic approach it is necessary to understand the context of emergence, the transformations of subjectivity, the consequences on clinical practices, and the means that have allowed its scientific and cultural appropriation in the second half of the twentieth century.

Published in History Research (Volume 11, Issue 1)
DOI 10.11648/j.history.20231101.11
Page(s) 1-7
Creative Commons

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.

Copyright

Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Science Publishing Group

Keywords

Mental Health, History of Medicine, Concept Formation, Emergence, Subjectivity, Clinical Practices

References
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    Wilson Daniel Ortiz Lopera. (2023). Historical Perspective on Mental Health: Emergence, Transformations of Subjectivity and Consequences in Clinical Practices. History Research, 11(1), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.history.20231101.11

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    Wilson Daniel Ortiz Lopera. Historical Perspective on Mental Health: Emergence, Transformations of Subjectivity and Consequences in Clinical Practices. Hist. Res. 2023, 11(1), 1-7. doi: 10.11648/j.history.20231101.11

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    AMA Style

    Wilson Daniel Ortiz Lopera. Historical Perspective on Mental Health: Emergence, Transformations of Subjectivity and Consequences in Clinical Practices. Hist Res. 2023;11(1):1-7. doi: 10.11648/j.history.20231101.11

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  • @article{10.11648/j.history.20231101.11,
      author = {Wilson Daniel Ortiz Lopera},
      title = {Historical Perspective on Mental Health: Emergence, Transformations of Subjectivity and Consequences in Clinical Practices},
      journal = {History Research},
      volume = {11},
      number = {1},
      pages = {1-7},
      doi = {10.11648/j.history.20231101.11},
      url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.history.20231101.11},
      eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.history.20231101.11},
      abstract = {Mental health has become a prolific field of research, concern, debate and intervention in the health sciences and human sciences in the last two decades. The fundamental interest of this brief history of the concept of mental health is to analyze the semantic and pragmatic configuration of the concept. There is a wide range of social uses of mental health. In the conditions of life of post-industrial capitalism since the Second World War, mental health has become a field of production of discourses and commodities addressed to the individual as coping templates, tools for self-understanding of their lives or mechanisms of meaning to overcome the difficulties of life. The event of mental health entails registers social events, socially mediated life experiences, cultural meanings, as well as capacities of agency over reality to the point of becoming a systematic articulation of human acts and contents of experience that ordered reality, therefore, it acquired the quality of a concept. Mental health is of relevance for historical work because it has left in its wake sources of various categories that require an exercise of compilation, systematization, reflection and narration. It is a reflexive concept for history: it reflects on experience, functions, practices and uses. It is part of what has been called the linguistic turn and the emotional turn, the awareness that both language and affective sensitivities sediment the understanding of the world. For this historiographic approach it is necessary to understand the context of emergence, the transformations of subjectivity, the consequences on clinical practices, and the means that have allowed its scientific and cultural appropriation in the second half of the twentieth century.},
     year = {2023}
    }
    

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Author Information
  • Department of History, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellín, Colombia

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