NARRACIÓN, MITO Y ENFERMEDAD MENTAL: HACIA UNA PSIQUIATRÍA CULTURAL

Abstract

This article studies the role of narrative in mental disorders, through the analysis of a clinical case documented at the Mental Health Unit of the Hospital San Juan de Dios, in Bogota (Colombia). To carry it out, the patient's clinical history was used, as well as the data gathered in two ethnographic interviews with her. The purposes of the article are thus three fold: first, to analize the patient's narrative plotin herown attempts to make sense ofher existential and mental dramae; second, to illustrate the split between the model of illness and model of disease, that is, between both, patient's and medical discourses; and finally, to discuss the ways scientific medicine has to construct its objects, through precise literary and rhetorical paths, in the writing-up of a conventional hospital's clinical history.