A dimensão política do diagnóstico na era neoliberal: breves observações sobre a depressão.

Abstract

This work aims to demonstrate how neoliberal rationality influences diagnoses in mental health, especially the diagnosis of depression. The methodology used was the work of a concept through a review of bibliographies, mainly of psychoanalysis and social theory. Historically, the clinical and social treatment given to subjects with some psychological distress is related to the culture of each era and the current way of exercising power. In modernity, the psychiatric paradigm regarding mental illnesses follows the logic of the biomedical knowledge-power device, which, within the individualizing neoliberal logic, makes each subject responsible for his illness and has as its maxim the improvement of himself and no longer the cure. In this sense, the diagnostic categories of our time serve much more to capture the hegemonic forms of discontent and translate them into a grammar that can be normalized than to express the nature of a mental illness. It is essential to remember that this advance has decisive consequences for society, such as the medicalization of life and the pathologization of existence. Such a hypothesis has immense political weight since a totalizing diagnostic reason corroborates the exhaustion of the capacity to deal with conflicts, contradictions, and reinventions, which, politically, generates a scenario of difficulties in dealing with otherness and with the contingencies of life that end up being pathologized.