Mental health has become a prolific field of research, concern, debate and intervention in the health sciences and human sciences in the last two decades. The fundamental interest of this brief history of the concept of mental health is to analyze the semantic and pragmatic configuration of the concept. There is a wide range of social uses of mental health. In the conditions of life of post-industrial capitalism since the Second World War, mental health has become a field of production of discourses and commodities addressed to the individual as coping templates, tools for self-understanding of their lives or mechanisms of meaning to overcome the difficulties of life. The event of mental health entails registers social events, socially mediated life experiences, cultural meanings, as well as capacities of agency over reality to the point of becoming a systematic articulation of human acts and contents of experience that ordered reality, therefore, it acquired the quality of a concept. Mental health is of relevance for historical work because it has left in its wake sources of various categories that require an exercise of compilation, systematization, reflection and narration. It is a reflexive concept for history: it reflects on experience, functions, practices and uses. It is part of what has been called the linguistic turn and the emotional turn, the awareness that both language and affective sensitivities sediment the understanding of the world. For this historiographic approach it is necessary to understand the context of emergence, the transformations of subjectivity, the consequences on clinical practices, and the means that have allowed its scientific and cultural appropriation in the second half of the twentieth century.