Mental Health in Primary Health Care: Necessary Advances

Although we can recognize many advances in mental health policies in the world, some challenges are not yet overcome. Psychiatric Reform movements have focused their efforts on decentralizing mental health care in psychiatric hospitals and setting up outpatient mental health services. However, the process of deinstitutionalization of madness is beyond changes in the organization and delivery of specialized mental health services. It requires cultural and paradigmatic changes about psychological, human, subjective but also social suffering, and that requires different ways of caring, which strengthen people’s autonomy including their possibilities and limits of being subject to their illness and health recovery