IMAGINARIOS SOCIALES DE LA LOCURA, POLICONTEXTURALIDAD Y BIOTECNOLOGíAS

Taking as its starting point an issue of Nature devoted to schizophrenia, this article analyzes the basic necessary concepts to investigate social imaginaries used in psychiatry to construct mental illness realities in our complex policontextuRal society. The bio-technological system and the pharmaceutical industry contribute to the construction of Mental Illness Imaginary elements. This contribution is consistent with a biomedical model casting doubts on it based on economic obscured drives and the side effects of meds. Far from understanding a social system as coherent social complexity where biotechnology is developed and implemented, its social reality is built on contradictions and the inconsistency of social imaginary perceptions. This paper provides the conceptual basis for describing the complex inconsistency in which the reality of mental illness is socially constructed from the Imaginary (implementing Pintos’s and Luhmann’s social system theory to Social Imaginaries of Mental Illness).