[Mental health and normality: popular conceptions in a northern coastal area of Bahia, Brazil].

This study focuses on signs, meanings, and practices related to mental normality and health in a northern coastal area of Bahia, Brazil. It discusses local conceptions about the non-existence or exclusive existence of mental normality, as well as points of view concerning total mental normality. It identifies the prototypes of normality, like "normal", "almost normal", and "false normal", as signs for distinguishing mentally normal persons. The article discusses the underlying values and concepts in local personal classification of mental normality and proposes a structural health device consisting of moral, scientific, religious, environmental, and social elements. It analyzes local normalization and mental health promotion actions and the local system of signs, meanings, and practices of normality. Finally, the article analyzes the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of health. All these goals are met by comparing local conceptions with the scientific literature on medical epistemology, psychoanalysis, sociological labeling theory, and medical anthropology.