Historical roots of psychopathology

Copyright © 2016 Telles-Correia and Sampaio. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.Mental illness and mental symptoms depend on a construction that results from the decisions of certain social agents, which, in a specific social and historical context, according to an epistemological framework (how symptoms and disorders are constructed and detected) and an ontological framework (how they are defined, what they consist of), identify the behaviors which make up a symptom or a disorder (Berrios, 2011). Only after these theoretical hypotheses of mental symptom and disorder have been outlined are the data which empirically validate them searched and found. Therefore, the objects of psychiatry (mental symptom and disorder) being the result of a social conjecture and a philosophical perspective rooted in a specific time, they should also be studied with elements from social and human sciences (history, sociology, philosophy) (Telles-Correia, 2015).