[Mental illness and stigma or how to become mentally ill for life.]

In this article mental illness is presented in a sociological perspective, giving prominence to social-interaction factors which, in many cases, are responsable for the permanence of this type of illness. Its thereotical base comes !form the psychology of social-interaction developped by G.H. Mead and his disciples. This perspective defines the social human being as derived from successive interactions, beginning, at birth, with maternal contacts and extending progressively to the entirety of the members of the community of which the individual is a part. This interactional network is comprised of messages, of responses, and of expectations which make up the norms and values which in turn from the basis for the distribution of roles and statuses- From these roles and statuses derive the behaviours acceptable to a given collectivity. Among other theoretical developments, interactionist sociology gave birth to formulations on deviance which became known, in american terminology as "labelling theory". In the case of mental illness many sociologists interested in the phenomenon have studied it, using the framework elaborated by the proponents of this approach to deviance. Thus, rather than considering the deviant as abnormal in himself, deviance is viewed as a process; that is, as the result of a series of interactions confronting the individual who is not, or does not behave like the collectivity as a whole and the milieu in which he lives. When the reaction of the entourage is negative, the so-called deviant is subjected to sanctions such as avoidance, rejection, exclusion, confinement, etc... This process terminates generally in stigmatization which wraps the deviant in a label from which he will probably never free himself. The studies cited demonstrate this interactional process at different stages of mental illness, these being; d) at the point of medical diagnosis, b) during hospitalisation, c) on leaving We psychiatric institution, d) and after the return to society. The conclusion leads to an appreciation of the drama experienced by psychiatric ex-patients, for most of whom the label "mentally ill" constitutes an apparently irreversible stigmatization.