Habilitation in mental health: critical remarks about the concept of rehabilitation

Abstract

In the landscape of contemporary Psychiatry, rehabilitation is a proposal that stands out for its reach and implies a question itself. This notion, borrowed from Medicine at large, is laden with negative aspects, due, among other causes, to the interpretive and evolutional incompatibility between the psychic and the bodily phenomena, and the separation between distinct therapeutic spheres. Instead, a different proposal is submitted here: an idea of habilitation according to which past condition is not seen as a stigma, and the experience of past malady is not rejected, but, on the contrary, becomes the starting point of a new process. By these means one values those rehabilitating practices that affirm the individual’s potentialities, and broaden the possibilities of his or her positive identity as well. The proper ground of habilitation is the ground of practices, and it involves differentials vis-à-vis the rehabilitation, in that it emphasizes the exercise of individual rights, the development of exchanges and cooperation. The habilitation affirms itself as a form of accomplished democracy, that arises from the subject’s very necessities.