Las enfermedades mentales

From the oldest cultures to the present, mental illnesses have been surrounded by the mystery of the intangible, an indefinite magma of strange behaviors, emotions out of control and symptoms of varied profusion and intensity that still do not find certainty about the origin, nor a precise location in the brain tissue. It seems that the further we go, the less we know; not for detracting from the new contributions, but because of the multiplication of paths that open each time we get closer to a destination that appears to be promising. This is the challenge of knowledge: not give up and keep going with the hope that each revelation is an achievement in itself. Advances in neuroscience, genetics, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology and innumerable contributions from other currents in the "psy" world try to answer a classic question, closer to the great existential questions than to earthly dilemmas: What is and why does our psyche get sick? I dare say that this book has an obedient side and a rebellious side (will it talk about me, perhaps?). The first one helps me to tell how psychiatry classifies, gathers and names the symptoms in different clinical pictures; From the second I recover and defend the human singularity, the personal frame of reference, from which each one of us understands, feels and organizes life. Behind each subject that suffers from mental suffering there is a personality that has closed to the dynamics of the experience, that has ceased to be free or has lost its identity referents; and worse still, she feels misunderstood by an environment that is not very empathetic with the ups and downs of the soul. The exposed variables are not incompatible, they come together and enrich each other; They are not stagnant either, they change with advances in science and new cultural and social paradigms. I would like Mental Illnesses not to be read only as a manual that meets the requirements of the "medical descriptive model", because it is also the testimony of human pain, of the "urgencies of the soul" and its multiple interpretations.