Public Policy, Mental Health and Professional Identity

In the context of current changes, social policies, including health policies in particular, are severely transformed in the redefinition of the functions of the State. Mental health practices are obviously affected by these policies, which generate concerns and occupations, analyses and reflections, and imply constant movements and transformations in the field. It seemed important to us to start from the authors' reference regarding the consideration of mental health practices as a simultaneous set of representations, knowledge and actions specific to a defined field, that of mental health, a non-homogeneous space of contradictions and antagonisms. Thus, the field of mental health becomes a sub-field of health practices in general, whose specificity is defined by the particular social construct of meaning regarding madness produced in modernity, and its specific institutional forms.