Social Representations about "Mental Health" in a group of professionals in Medellin city: prototipical and categorial analysis

The Mental Health (MH) consists in an object of discourses and scientific practices and also, it is an object of Social Representation (SR) which results in a set of knowledge that comes from an elaborated and differentiated social sense. In this paper the SR about mental health built by professionals working in the field of (MH) in Medellin, Colombia are explored. A prototypical and categorical analysis was performed based on free word association with an inductive term "Mental Health". 117 professionals including psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and medical professionals participated in the study. The prototype analysis identified the words "balance and stability" as the core of representation. In the categorical analysis, three categories emerged: mental health dimension, perspective and interventions. The findings confirmed the imbricated relation between scientific and lay knowledge about the MH, even in the case of professionals working in this field, involving the ideological background and common sense of discourses and practices of MH in the field of expert knowledge.