[Definition of mental illness and discoursive strategies in psychiatry]

Defining mental illness was presented in the article both as a matter of medical knowledge and a political issue. This latter aspect cannot be successfully dealt with by psychiatry itself, since it is a branch of medicine, nevertheless bioethics offers here its competences and possibilities. The presentation of some elements of traditional strategies in defining mental illness introduces a draft of such a project of the definition procedure, which reinforces the constantly threatened (by the decrease of sovereignity) social and legal status of psychiatry, and--on the other hand--enables us to support the evidently handicapped status of psychiatric patients. This solitary definition strategy, which support both psychiatric circles and patients, assumes that a popular modern tendency to deny the very reality of the mental illness is to be avoided. The definition of mental illness proposed in the article is pragmatic in character and is based on a definition of mental illness as a kind of spiritual disorder.