An anthropological analysis of the psychiatric classification of the mental breakdown experience

Abstract (English)

The present work aimed to explore the controversies and disputes involved in the construction, transformation and application of psychiatric diagnoses and, more specifically, the diagnosis of the “mental breakdown” experience. To this end, one of my privileged research objects was the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of Mental Disorders, the DSMs. Produced since 1952 by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the DSMs, especially since their third edition (1980), are the nosological reference framework for professionals in the field worldwide (Russo; Venâncio, 2006). Articles located in the interstices between psychiatry and anthropology, as well as the sequence of the ICDs (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems), developed by the WHO, also presented themselves as a fertile field of analysis, inciting and further explaining the possibility of tensioning the epistemological body of psychiatry. In addition to this, and entering an eminently anthropological domain, we analyzed how anthropology is capable of destabilizing the fundamental assumptions of psychiatry and, on the other hand, how concepts arising from anthropology, such as the notion of culture, are handled by psychiatrists themselves. In this sense, this research locates itself and explores the ambiguous space of tensions and ruptures that involve the very foundation of psychiatric diagnoses.