Social Order and Mental Health: a Social Wellbeing Approach

“Health is a state of physical, social and psychological wellbeing, and not simply the absence of illness”. This definition, repeated ad infinitum since 1948, when it was adopted as its own by the World Health Organization (WHO), and although essentially sidelined by a large proportion of the disciplines traditionally responsible for the study of health, has taken on a new profile in the wake of two developments: on the one hand, the shift from a health model bound up with illness and focused on the presence within the subject of physical or psychological symptoms to a model revolving around the presence of indicators and conditions that promote and facilitate wellbeing, and following on from this, the realization that such a state of wellbeing can only apply to subjects within a particular set of socio-historical coordinates. The idea of a subject suspended in a vacuum, a biomedical subject within a biological psychiatry (Pérez, 2003, p. 13), propagated by traditional Clinical Psychology, is pure fiction. Such a subject does not exist: he would lack “humanity” (Johann F. Herbart), she would have no higher mental structure (Vygotsky), he would be incapable of developing as a person in the psychological sense of the term (Mead), she would lack identity, according to the proposals of Festinger and Tajfel. In a Psychology that claims to respond in a valid way to the challenges of today’s world it is essential to take on board a simple assumption which enjoys solid theoretical and empirical support: that health is a state of wellbeing of a subject belonging to a socio-historical context. A concept of health revolving around conditions that promote wellbeing was what had been promised by Positive Psychology (Snyder & López, 2002). In its early form, and without the need to make it explicit, it fully embraced the WHO philosophy on making its goal the realization of “a change in the approach of SOCIAL ORDER AND MENTAL HEALTH: A SOCIAL WELLBEING APPROACH