Abstract

While the psychiatric perspective on pathologising vital cycles and processes, sexual diversity, and the stages of childhood life receives more and more rejection of their positions, the trend toward depathologisation as drifts in social movements and sociological, psychological, anthropological, and philosophical perspectives still does not offer practical solutions to mental illness and psychological suffering. The depathologising gaze, promoted not only by social movements or emerging disciplines—such as Mad Studies and child-centered philosophy—but also recently by traditional disciplines, has the harmful effect of abandoning many suffering people, whose expectations in “Psy” professionals are vital to solving your real problems.How can one find a middle ground between these two tendencies?There’s not a simple answer to that problem. So, authors in this chapter propose a revision of the term pathos as a cultural object and its human implication. The question is linked with some of the foundational conceptions about the human being (Vygotski, Pensamiento y lenguaje. Editora Revolucionaria, 1926; Foucault, Naissance de la Clinique. Presses Universitaires de France, 1963; Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique. PUF, 1966) and its expressions (Deleuze, Las cartas del mal (13/1/1981) en Gilles Deleuze: En medio de Spinoza. Cactus, 1981).Culture, time, aesthetics, consciousness; continuity body-mind; instinct-pulsion, virtualisation, networks, and so on are some of the concepts revisited in this chapter to reframe the de question.Pathos, psychopathology, pathologisation, depathologisation, and mental health and illness are presented in this chapter as differentiated concepts with particular effects in each cultural context and referential frame, but particularly in each singular case (Forrester, Thinking in cases. Polity, 2017) as an empirical level for analysing the human nature (Foucault, Naissance de la Clinique. Presses Universitaires de France, 1963).Thus, a reframe of pathology and mental health is proposed, as a result of a new set of particular relationships, according to the formula opportunely analysed on Spinoza by Vygotski (Pensamiento y lenguaje. Editora Revolucionaria, 1926) and Deleuze (Las cartas del mal (13/1/1981) en Gilles Deleuze: En medio de Spinoza. Cactus, 1981), respectively.