I Am Because They Tell Me I Am: Mental Health and Performativity

Abstract

This article discusses madness and its production, aiming to circumscribe Butler's performativity and Foucault's Theory of Discourse in the field of mental health. Madness has historically had different conceptions and social functions. In different contexts and cultures, care practices were created to heal, rescue and disalienate. All these practices built modes of subjectivation and ways of controlling what would become mental illness and psychopathology. But what is madness without medical-psychiatric discourse based on biological practices? How to understand madness from a critical epistemology based on the assumptions of applied human and social sciences? Thus, this article has as its methodology a bibliographical review research, having as main references the post-structuralist philosophy and the sociology of health, rescuing the history of madness and its conceptions: critical and tragic, based on Foucault's theory in dialogue with authors classics of the sociology of health. It is also observed how practices of medicalization of madness were systematized in Brazil, with the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) having the principle of universality and equity. With this, it was possible to observe and conclude how the language system and performativity build dissident subjectivities and produce mental patients, insofar as language produces subjects within a pre-established norm, dictating the molds of normal and pathological. The criticism carried out is not just to remove the logic of the biological discourse, but to build epistemologies that find the subject of experience and transform him into a subject of self-knowledge.