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Introduction
Francisco Ortega is ICREA (Catalan Instituttion for Research and Advanced Studies) Research Professor at the Medical Anthropology Research Center, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona. He is also Visiting Professor at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of King’s College, London.
Current institution
Current position
- ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) Research Professor
Additional affiliations
Position
- ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) Research Professor
January 2016 - January 2016
March 2015 - February 2017
Education
September 1991 - June 1995
September 1986 - June 1991
Publications
Publications (214)
Introduction: This study aims to generate evidence on healthcare practitioners' initiatives to integrate community health principles into primary care. Two case studies explore the co-design and co-development of tailored solutions to address the emerging health needs of vulnerable populations in the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona. The interventio...
Elementos de desinformação na percepção pública sobre a vacina contra a dengue no Brasil: uma análise de comentários em mídias sociais Elements of misinformation in the public perception of the dengue vaccine in Brazil: an analysis of comments on social media Elementos de desinformación en la percepción pública de la vacuna contra el dengue en Bras...
The expansion of mental health discourses within the university has attained global relevance over the course of the past decade. This article focuses on the Chilean case, exploring the diagnostic uses and affective negotiations on campus. The findings presented are part of a broader qualitative research that examined the interrelations between the...
Retos de la atención primaria en salud después de la pandemia de COVID-19: salud comunitaria y participación social (RETCOV).
Introduction
Brazilian Primary Health Care (PHC) is responsible for all-sanitary actions for a community-based population, including health promotion and mental health care. Mindfulness Based Health Promotion (MBHP) is an intervention that can promote self-care and psychosocial support in PHC.
Objective
To discuss the effects of mindfulness based...
Loneliness among young people has been increasing in recent years and is considered a major public health problem. This article delves into the sociocultural dynamics that favour the experiences of loneliness. For this purpose, 40 students between 19 and 24 years of age were interviewed using the photo elicitation interview (PEI) strategy. The resu...
Introduction: The Brazilian Primary Health Care (PHC) on Unified Health System (SUS) is responsible for all-sanitary actions for a community-based population, including health promotion and mental health care. Mindfulness Based Health Promotion (MBHP) is an intervention that can promote self-care and psychosocial support in PHC. Objective: to discu...
The introduction of mental health collaborative care (MHCC) is one of the strategies to scale up access to mental health care in primary health care in Brazil. This article investigates an experience of mental health collaborative care in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is a qualitative study involving interviews with physicians and mental h...
Resumo As condições psicopatológicas decorrentes de acontecimentos traumáticos vêm progressivamente recebendo interpretações de natureza neurocientífica. Com isso, experiências humanas devastadoras são reduzidas ao funcionamento perturbado de sistemas neurofisiológicos atribuídos às respostas de estresse. Através de revisão narrativa, este artigo p...
Resumo Desde o seu nascimento na medicina cirúrgica do século XVII, a pesquisa do trauma admitiu interpretações múltiplas e associadas ora às lesões visíveis de órgãos e tecidos, ora à influência de agentes psíquicos patogênicos sobre a memória, a consciência e a personalidade. Com o aprofundamento do papel dos sistemas classificatórios desde DSM-I...
Planning and implementing health policies and practices in countries with Primary Health Care-oriented systems must recognize and manage social inequality issues in health, which hinder comprehensive and equitable care. A widely advocated strategy for detecting and dealing with such challenges is the notion of cultural competence (CC). In this arti...
O planejamento e a implementação de políticas e práticas de saúde em países com sistemas orientados para a Atenção Primária em Saúde devem reconhecer e manejar as questões de desigualdade social em saúde que interferem no cuidado integral e equânime. Uma estratégia amplamente defendida para detectar e lidar com tais desafios é a noção de competênci...
Resumo O planejamento e a implementação de políticas e práticas de saúde em países com sistemas orientados para a Atenção Primária em Saúde devem reconhecer e manejar as questões de desigualdade social em saúde que interferem no cuidado integral e equânime. Uma estratégia amplamente defendida para detectar e lidar com tais desafios é a noção de com...
Planning and implementing health policies and practices in countries with Primary Health Care-oriented systems must recognize and manage social inequality issues in health, which hinder comprehensive and equitable care. A widely advocated strategy for detecting and dealing with such challenges is the notion of cultural competence (CC). In this arti...
Artículo introductorio al Monográfico "Antropología y salud global" en la Revista de Antropología Social. El enlace al monográfico entero aquí: https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/RASO/issue/view/4274
2023 marks the 35th anniversary of Brazil’s current
Constitution (1988), where health was defined as a
universal right and a State responsibility. Since the mid-
1970s, the Health Reform Movement (Movimento da
Reforma Sanitária) opposed the military dictatorship
(1964–1985) and played a key role in the democratization
of the country. Bringing toget...
Apesar de carregar “mental” em seu nome, no que concerne aos profissionais inseridos em serviços de atenção diária a portadores de transtornos mentais, não há tanto questionamento sobre os pressupostos teóricos que implicam a caracterização que qualifica e delimita o campo da saúde mental. O que é o “mental” da saúde mental? Com vistas a contribuir...
Resumo A percepção do papel do trauma psicológico na origem de problemas psiquiátricos aumentou e diminuiu ao longo da história da psiquiatria. Com a concepção do transtorno de estresse pós-traumático (TEPT), entretanto, as sociedades ocidentais presenciaram uma profunda expansão do discurso do traumatismo na interpretação de experiências humanas d...
Resumo O trabalho apresenta os resultados de uma pesquisa qualitativa realizada com estudantes de medicina de uma Liga de Saúde Mental e Psiquiatria (LASMP). Teve como objetivos sensibilizá-los para perceber a si mesmos como pessoas e instrumentalizá-los com outras racionalidades distintas das formas de pensamento biomédicas. Os grupos reflexivos,...
Desde o lançamento da terceira versão do Manual Diagnóstico e Estatístico de Transtornos Mentais (DSM-III), a psiquiatria biológica vem sistematicamente aplicando seu raciocínio classificatório a fenômenos sociais de múltiplas naturezas. Nessa perspectiva, ganha relevância o discurso do trauma, pelo qual acontecimentos de magnitude devastadora pass...
Brazilian mental health care reform understands mental health as a complex social process. There is a large literature production within the country focused on deinstitutionalization policy, social determinants of mental health and human rights, however, with little recognition beyond Latin American borders. In addition, cultural dimensions of ment...
Brazilian mental health focuses on the social determination model within mental health policies and interventions to address mental and social suffering as resulting from social exclusion and structural violence. Structural concerns focused on class stratification and socioeconomic inequalities overweight cultural ones in Brazilian mental health. I...
It has been almost two years since the COVID-19 outbreak changed the way humanity lives. Among the transformations, we find the core existential beliefs, the interpersonal relationships, the emotion regulation strategies, the perceptions of our mortality, time and space, the role of science and culture, and the sense of uncertainty and interdepende...
It has been almost two years since the COVID-19 outbreak changed the way humanity lives. Among the transformations, we find the core existential beliefs, the interpersonal relationships, the emotion regulation strategies, the perceptions of our mortality, time and space, the role of science and culture, and the sense of uncertainty and interdepende...
Strong public health governance and leadership driven by scientific
evidence, community participation, and attention to social and
structural determinants of health are key to effective covid-19
containment. Given the failure of the federal government in Brazil to
adopt effective public health measures, state and municipal
governments, as well as c...
La pandemia de Covid-19 representa un desafío sin precedentes de gobernanza de salud pública global que ha puesto en jaque presupuestos teóricos y ha trastocado dicotomías y jerarquías como global/local, norte global/sur global o políticas de «arriba hacia abajo»/intervenciones de base, que estructuran el campo de la salud global. La primera parte...
Five international consensus statements on concussion in sports have been published. This commentary argues that there is a strong need for a new approach to them that foregrounds public health expertise and patient-centered guidance. Doing so will help players, parents and practitioners keep perspective about these potentially life-altering injuri...
Mental illness approaches in public health have resulted in controversies around the adequacy of interpretative and therapeutic models. These controversies engage polarized debates amid understandings of mental illnesses either as brain disorders or as socioculturally determined entities. Aiming to investigate how mental health care is implemented...
Global Mental Health is a field of research and practice that addresses the expansion of universal and equitable mental health care worldwide. This article explores the ways the concept of culture is employed in Global Mental Health literature. Global Mental Health advocates and critics assume an ontological separation between ‘nature’ and ‘culture...
In the last 25 years of the 20th century, psychopathology coded a diverse range of social phenomena under the heading of trauma, featuring the study of psychological trauma as an autonomous area progressively informed by cultural and neurobiological research. In this scenario, we witnessed the emergence of the biocultural paradigm, an epistemologic...
This article explores the local forms that global controversies around autism and ADHD have taken in France and Brazil. Inquiring into the social and historical features of the two contexts makes the abstract, globally circulating ideas meaningful in particular forms, and helps to transcend dichotomies (global/local, biological/relational, mental s...
Promoting evidence-based treatments and the human rights of people living with mental illness are the two pillars of Global Mental Health (GMH). Critics counter that human rights narratives must also include social justice frameworks. We draw on the cases of autism and ADHD in Brazil to discuss the role of human rights in mental health in the conte...
Mutual aid practice eschews paternalistic and charity-oriented development models and works to deactivate structures of inequity while building new infrastructures for living. Solidarity practices in the favelas have much to teach global and public health experts. Based on published reports and the insights of eight activists involved in mutual aid...
This research aimed to study, through a bibliographical review, how the considerations made mainly by Lawrence Kirmayer, Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman can contribute to the field of mental health in Brazil. For the purpose of bringing a global health referential that would enrich the strategies used by the Psychosocial Care Network (RAPS), it w...
In this editorial, we draw on examples from Brazil and Chile to explore how, within local mental health systems, ‘contexts’ behave in ways that do not necessarily follow the logic of implementation. Context and culture are not only facilitators or barriers; they are contentious dimensions of identity (as in the case of Brazil), and their relevance...
Global Mental Health (GMH) is the field of study, research, and intervention, which aims at improving access to mental health worldwide. It is based on the global burden of disease research program and on the existence of a large “treatment gap” between the need and availability of mental health services, displaying individual and social costs of u...
Brazil’s governance of the COVID-19 pandemic has been described as nothing short of tragic by several commentators. President Jair Bolsonaro’s dangerous brew of neoliberal authoritarianism, science denialism and ableism has plunged this country into catastrophe. In this article we argue that this form (or lack) of public health governance can best...
The neurodiversity movement has so far been dominated by autistic people who believe their condition is not a disease to be treated and, if possible, cured, but rather a human specificity (like sex or race) that must be equally respected. Very few studies have been conducted to examine the significance of the neurosciences and the cerebralization o...
Autores da Saúde Mental Global defendem, de um lado, o aumento do acesso aos cuidados de saúde mental, inclusive com o uso de intervenções padronizadas. De outro lado, na Atenção Primária à Saúde no Brasil, a apresentação sintomatológica do sofrimento emocional pelos pacientes dificulta sua identificação pelos profissionais, comprometendo o cuidado...
The conceptual and practical work done by social medicine and global health have often overlapped. In this paper, we argue that new efforts to apprehend ‘the social’ in social medicine offer important insights to global health along five lines of critical analysis: (1) reconfigurations of the state and new forms of political activism, (2) philanthr...
Since its emergence in 2007, Global Mental Health has been a growing and polemic area of study, research and practice in mental health worldwide. Despite having a significant endogenous academic production and innovative policy experiences, the Brazilian mental health field and its actors make few references to, and scarcely dialogue with, the Glob...
A Saúde Mental Global é um campo de ensino, pesquisa e prática, cuja prioridade é melhorar o acesso e assegurar a equidade no cuidado em saúde mental para todas as pessoas do mundo, propondo ações especialmente em países de média e baixa renda, como o Brasil. Diante desse panorama mundial e considerando o avanço local dos processos das reformas san...
This chapter is a commentary on “Autism Policy in Brazil and the USA” and “Psychiatric Reform and Autism Services in Italy and Brazil.” It examines a range of views on autism theory and practice, policies relating to autism, and options for treatments in the United States, Italy, and Brazil. These pieces offer insightful perspectives on how global...
Imaginamos este libro, como una contribución a una reflexión que recupere lo mejor de la tradición crítica, problematizadora e historizante de la medicalización de la sociedad, pero que ofrezca múltiples panoramas actualizados, rigurosos y exhaustivos para observar estos procesos en la Argentina y en los países que componen el sur de América Latina...
Imaginamos este libro, como una contribución a una reflexión que recupere lo mejor de la tradición crítica, problematizadora e historizante de la medicalización de la sociedad, pero que ofrezca múltiples panoramas actualizados, rigurosos y exhaustivos para observar estos procesos en la Argentina y en los países que componen el sur de América Latina...
Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject is a fine-grained account of the "neuro-" in a range of disciplines, and, importantly-crucially-, takes stock of the history and scope of this prefix. But more than this the book is an exploration, a critical engagement with the surge of brain-centered approaches to behavior, to physiology, to mind, to subj...
Since the 1990s, several disciplines have emerged at the interface between neuroscience and the sciences of cultures. Their goal is to understand both how the brain produces culture and how culture is inscribed in the brain. In this chapter we offer an overview of neuroanthropology and cultural neuroscience, the two main “neurodisciplines of cultur...
Resumo A Psiquiatria Biológica emerge nos anos de 1980, nos Estados Unidos, com a publicação do DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Este manual tem a proposta de ser a-teórico e apresentar descrições objetivas dos, então, chamados “distúrbios mentais” a partir de um critério classificatório que não inclui discussões ace...
The chapter explores the cerebralization of psychological distress. The psychopharmacological revolution took place in the 1950s. Later on, the nosological biologization of mental disorders received a crucial impetus when DSM III opened the way to redescribing in neurological terms disorders such as schizophrenia, autism and depression. Behaviors p...
This chapter considers the emergence, since the 1990s, of fields whose names often combine the suffix neuro with the name of one of the human and social sciences, from anthropology and art history to education, law and theology. These “disciplines of the neuro ” reframe the human sciences and their corresponding subjects on the basis of knowledge a...
The conclusion underlines that all the fields analyzed in the book share what we characterized as a “modern creed.” It explains that such creed is modern because of its chronology, and because it is an element of the psychological, philosophical, political and scientific cosmologies usually identified to modernity. It is a creed because it states b...
This book offers a critical exploration of the influential and pervasive belief that “we are our brains” (and that therefore he neurosciences will provide the key to all human phenomena). Since the 1990s, “neurocentrism” has become widespread in most Western and many non-Western societies. Advances, especially in neuroimaging, decisively bolstered...
The first chapter proposes to trace the distant roots of the cerebral subject to the late seventeenth century, and particularly to debates about the seat of the soul, the corpuscularian theory of matter, and John Locke’s philosophy of personal identity. In the wake of Locke, eighteenth century authors began to assert that the brain is the only part...
The introduction presents the basic question this book seeks to explore: How did the idea that humans are essentially their brains become thinkable? It also positions itself not “against” brain research, but against some of the most extravagant claims of the “neuro.” It explains that although the book does not explicitly explore the biopolitical re...
The chapter addresses forms of the neuro in popular culture. Film and literature have in many ways rehearsed the connection between personal identity, having a body and being a brain, and have been major sites for elaborating and questioning the human as cerebral subject. Numerous works can be identified as “brain movies” and “brain novels:” most F...
Being Brains offers a critical exploration of one of the most influential and pervasive contemporary beliefs: “We are our brains.” Starting in the “Decade of the Brain” of the 1990s, “neurocentrism” became widespread in most Western and many non-Western societies. Formidable advances, especially in neuroimaging, have bolstered this “neurocentrism”...
Resumen El trabajo tiene como objetivo ofrecer un análisis sistemático de algunos resultados de investigaciones realizadas en Argentina y Brasil relacionadas con el uso del metilfenidato, su prescripción y la regulación de la venta. También examinamos las discusiones entre investigadores y profesionales que asisten a personas diagnosticadas con TDA...
Since the 1990s, several disciplines have emerged at the interface between neuroscience and the social and human sciences. For the most part, they aim at capturing the commonalities that underlay the heterogeneity of human behaviors and experiences. Neuroanthropology and cultural neuroscience, or the "neurodisciplines of culture," appear different,...
This article approaches the claims of two main parent-activists groups - Light Blue and Sky Blue - in the struggle for the “right to treatment” of autism in the state of Rio de Janeiro. It focuses mainly on the forms of discourses and tensions about care and treatments provided by the Unified Health System (SUS). Therefore, our purpose is to unders...
This is a conceptual theoretical study to reflect upon disability and some basic concepts that are involved in its profiling. The scope of the article is to broaden the outlook upon disability removing it from a description that reduces it to an ailment. For this purpose, we situated the Disability Studies historically presenting the Medical and So...
Since its emergence in 2007, the field of Global Mental Health has faced constant criticism by Transcultural Psychiatry and the Social Sciences. A main issue is the field's supposed tendency to make use of biological explanations so as to explain mental disorders, which would then have any other dimensions relegated to background. In order to analy...
Resumo: A compreensão dos processos de formação dos transtornos mentais vem se mostrando desafiadora desde a fundação do campo psiquiátrico. O desenvolvimento das neurociências proporcionou novo fôlego à expectativa de encontrar estritamente no funcionamento biológico a explicação para o surgimento dos transtornos mentais. No entanto, tal objetivo...
From a critical analysis of medicalization studies, and as a contribution to these perspectives, we describe and analyze the ways in which the transnational pharmaceutical industry penetrates diverse social spaces, with different marketing strategies, to consolidate medicalized processes in Argentina and Brazil. We analyzed two expansion methods of...
In this paper we explore how our cultural contexts give rise to different kinds of knowledges of autism and examine how they are articulated, gain currency, and form the basis for policy, practice and political movements. We outline key tensions for the development of critical autism studies as an international, critical abilities approach. Our aim...
http://www.mbe-erice.org/papers/2015-mbe-erice-10years-web.pdf
Medicalización más allá de los médicos: marketing farmacéutico en torno al trastorno por déficit de atención e hiperactividad en Argentina y Brasil Abstract From a critical analysis of medicalization studies, and as a contribution to these perspectives, we describe and analyze the ways in which the transnational pharmaceutical industry penetrates d...
Este artigo apresenta uma análise teórica sobre a integração da saúde mental na atenção primária sob a perspectiva dos objetivos e estratégias da Saúde Mental Global (Global Mental Health - GMH). Esta tarefa é dividida em duas partes. A primeira parte é dedicada a estudos internacionais de revisão sobre o tema, e a segunda trata de publicações norm...
. The series identified a major treatment gap between the need for and availability of mental health services and empha -sized the individual and social costs of undiag-nosed and untreated mental illness, in addition to the demand for effective and accessible inter-ventions, especially in low and middle-income countries
Embora o autismo não seja uma doença contagiosa, fala-se de uma “epidemia de
autismo”, em alusão ao aumento vertiginoso do número de casos num período curto
de tempo. O artigo traça um panorama das concepções socialmente partilhadas
sobre o autismo no Brasil, a partir das narrativas que vêm conferindo
visibilidade ao tema na mídia impressa brasilei...
In psychiatry, the possibilities of intervention in the risk for development of mental disorders are now receiving greater attention, motivating researches and causing controversies. Among the several investigations about risk and psychiatric categories that have been conducted in the international scenario, proposals intended to previously detect...
In recent decades, neuroscientific theories began to be adopted as central to the etiology of mental disorders explanation. Aiming to find the foundations of disorders, investigations took prioritized genetic load and brain functioning. From the valuation of biological determination of diseases and the emergence of various technologies of medical r...
This article examines the pertinence of the concept of medicalization for socio-cultural analysis. The study is based on the criticism which emerged in the international literature between 2000 and 2010. The criticism stressed the excessive generality of the expression that encompasses different situations and thereby loses its analytical precision...
This article examines the pertinence of the concept of medicalization for socio-cultural analysis. The study is based on the criticism which emerged in the international literature between 2000 and 2010. The criticism stressed the excessive generality of the expression that encompasses different situations and thereby loses its analytical precision...
This book examines the confusions and contradictions that manifest in prevalent attitudes towards the body, as well as in related bodily practices. The body is simultaneously our reference for the certainties of nature and the locus of a desire for transformation and reinvention. The body is at the same time worshipped and despised; an object of de...
The goal of this article is to present a snapshot of an ongoing debate within
epidemiology, pitching opposing sides in the struggle to define the path it should follow
in the years to come. The debate among epidemiologists in the mid-90s pitted those who
defended the idea that epidemiology should necessarily deal with a wide context against
those w...
Los objetivos de la investigación fueron comprender e interpretar los significados que los profesores de Educación Física atribuyen al cuerpo y al envejecimiento e investigar en que medida esas representaciones podrían influenciar su práctica profesional. Esta investigación, de naturaleza cualitativa, fue realizada con 43 profesores de escuelas y g...
