Un saber menos dado: nuevos posicionamientos en el campo de la salud mental colectiva

Angel Martínez-Hernáez, Martín Correa-Urquiza

Collective health is a paradigm with a long history in Latin America. Similarly, collective mental health has had an interesting development in certain Latin American countries, even acting to stimulate psychiatric reform. However, both paradigms appear to be encapsulated in specific times and places, among other reasons because of a hegemonic global-scale epistemology that, by imposing a naturalized model of truth, denies other forms of knowledge the opportunity to question not only already-established disease categories, treatment protocols and health policies, but the established order itself. In this article, we reflect on the power of ethnography, as both a form of knowledge and a social relation in itself, to broaden the space available for a possible field of collective health in a context where it is still incipient: Europe. The ethnographic point of view allows us to rethink that which is already accepted, creating permeability in entrenched practices and opening up surprising new possibilities.