Editorial

This volume contains papers by 20 senior academics and researchers that present their views and reflections on the practice and history of psychiatry in Latin America.

The role of the Latin American Group of Transcultural Studies (GLADET) has been critical in ensuring that the intellectual memory of Latin American psychiatry is sustained. Many psychiatric texts have been highlighted in our understanding practice of Latin American psychiatry. Within our group many transcendental books have been developed, such as the Guía Latinoamericana de diagnóstico psiquiátrico (Latin American guide to psychiatric diagnosis), (Asociación Psiquiátrica de América Latina, 2004) in which for the first time an ideographic axis in the context of a comprehensive diagnostic formulation became a reality. Another book Psiquiatría, naturaleza y cultura (Psychiatry, nature and culture), (Villaseñor Bayardo, 2009) with the collaboration of authors from several continents and with a richness and multi-coloured hues, has, we believe, a very high scientific value. Apuntes para una etnopsiquiatría Mexicana (Notes for a Mexican ethnopsychiatry), (Villaseñor Bayardo, 2008) and Viento y arena: testimonios de un pueblo nahua (Wind and sand: testimonies of Nahua people), (Villaseñor Bayardo, 2008) both written by Sergio Villaseñor-Bayardo, published by the University of Guadalajara, highlight cultural aspects and values.

The texts presented here are taken from a fundamental work for Latin America: Antología de textos clásicos de la psiquiatría Latinoamericana (Anthology of classic texts of Latin American psychiatry), (Villaseñor Bayardo, Rojas Malpica, Garrabé de Lara, 2015) a work that is significant and of high quality. It has the hardness of the hardest of the minerals from nature and carries the beautiful symbolic meaning of America in the unstable sheet of paper. It is a continent that is heard in the voice of its academics from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. A visit to each of these texts is an excursion through some of the psychiatric thinking of Latin American countries, from its initial moments of amniotic origin to the most recent exercises of ownership of our realities in sometimes tense but sustained dialogue with the humanities and social sciences. The penetrating and critical eye of contemporary Latin American psychiatry is indebted to academic eyes; it has a starting point that is threaded into the present and will carry on into the future. A territory of miscegenation, lacerations and acute pain, Latin America is a huge electric arc putting into tension and challenging various truths or statement intended as absolute or eternal. Some of these texts have been rescued from the past so that current and future generations can learn, and the flame of knowledge continues to burn bright. The history of modern Latin American psychiatry is still relatively poorly documented. Certainly we must recognize documentary discontinuities and historical crannies that point to unknown places or in some cases to nowhere. In the case of the history of medicine in general and psychiatry in particular, the problems are not so different. Something important remains from the legacy of the indigenous cultures of America, especially the so-called high cultures of Central and South America. There are beautiful documents written by indigenous peoples and the first mestizos. For example, let us highlight the text by Martín de la Cruz: Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis (De la Cruz, 1964) and the Royal Commentaries of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. In both texts knowledge about life, illness and death is collected, whose importance in daily living cannot be denied. When the Spanish crown asked Nicolás Monardes to compile and describe herbs and medicines from the Indies, he recognized the unknown wisdom that deserved to be studied by Spain. The first universities and medical schools in Latin America were founded in the 16th century, but continued to develop until the nineteenth century when the winds of independence were blowing. It is clear that their medical education was based on the Hippocratic concepts and strongly influenced by the Catholic Church as the dominant moral power at that particular point. Although in the 16th century nobody yet talked about psychiatry, the first institution for the treatment of the mentally ill in America (Hospice of San Hipólito), was founded by the friar Bernardino Álvarez in Mexico in 1566. Thus, universities and Latin American hospices were founded prior to the ones in the USA, where the Industrial Revolution and the capitalist thought arrived first.

Mental illness did not enter into the epistemological field of medicine until Philippe Pinel, at the time of the French Revolution, called for a new treatment concept based on naturalistic thought that prevailed in the medical thinking of the time. Most of the texts of psychiatric interest known in America were French translations made in Spain or Spanish texts of strong French influence. Thus, Latin American psychiatry is marked by the epistemological climate of positivism born along with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which also nourished our processes of independence. The effort to organize the new republican societies from the ideals of modernity is a constant in our history since the 19th century until now. This is felt and perceived in the writings both by the first as well as contemporary authors. The 19th century French science gave way to the German in the first decades of the 20th century, and it changed again after World War II.

What roles has Latin American psychiatry played in the historical contexts mentioned? We believe that it is time to evaluate those roles and the Antología de textos clásicos de la psiquiatría Latinoamericana (Villaseñor Bayardo, Rojas Malpica, Garrabé de Lara, 2015) may be a good starting point. Here, we are presenting only some of the selected texts that belong to the work mentioned.

Europe has already gathered outstanding collections of classic texts under the auspices of the World Psychiatric Association. Versions from Italy, France, Spain and Germany were released in English in recent years under the generic title Anthology of Psychiatric Texts (Maj & Ferro, 2002; Cousin, Garrabé & Morozov, 2008; López Ibor, Carbonell & Garrabé, 2001; Sass, 2007).

When Professor Jean Garrabé de Lara and Sergio J. Villaseñor Bayardo were awarded with the Rectory Order: “Alejo Zuloaga” by the University of Carabobo. With the third Franco-Carabobeño-Jalisciense Conference of Psychiatry in the city of Valencia, Venezuela, on 16–17 March 2010 further discussions led to a clearer way forward. We immediately accepted with enthusiasm the challenge that the Latin American Group of Transcultural Studies, would focus on the difficult task of preparing an anthology of psychiatry, rescuing the classic texts published by Latin American deceased psychiatry professors. The professor of “La Verrière” (Institut Psychiatrique Marcel Rivière) used to say that the key for choosing the texts was that the authors had been transmitters of ideas, had been able to establish a school, and had also published their work.

We would like to express deep gratitude to the colleagues who generously devoted a significant part of their time to select the texts proudly presented here. The participants in the selection of texts for this issue of the International Review of Psychiatry were Sergio Javier Villaseñor Bayardo, Carlos Rojas Malpica, Alejandra Niño Amieva, Renato D. Alarcón, Humberto Casarotti, Néstor de la Portilla Geada and Pedro Téllez Pacheco.

For this anthology we compiled texts from Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. The selected articles are preceded by a brief account of the author and their scientific viewpoints. The topics are diverse and interesting, to the point that some of them could be part of the investigations made by Mario Vargas Llosa in his novel La Guerra del Fin del Mundo (The war of the end of the world) (Vargas Llosa, 1981). We reiterate the fact that Latin American psychiatry was born crossed by the epistemological climate of French positivism, which is especially noticeable in the articles from the 19th century. There are studies that were published and/or presented in Europe, where they generated further comments. Some works are naturalistic, where biological determinants of mental illness are examined; other articles try to increase depth of teaching, while some authors try to identify conflicts of the national soul and its psychosocial implications, from a perspective that we might call dialectical and critical. The most recent articles show a searching and a more authentic voice of the continent. If we could synthesize in one line Latin American psychiatric thought, there is no better synthesis than the one proposed by Renato Alarcón that says that our psychiatry is “mestizo, social and critical” (Alarcón 2015). In any case, we present this compilation, inevitably and unfortunately incomplete, as necessary input and license to start a debate. In contemporary Latin America all currents of knowledge with varying degrees of depth circulate nowadays. Finally, here is the recovery of a part of our history that we cannot ignore.

Sergio Javier VILLASEÑOR-BAYARDOUniversidad de Guadalajara, Centro Universitario de Ciencias de la Salud MéxicoCarlos Rojas MalpicaDepartamento de Salud Mental de la Facultad de Ciencias de la Salud, Universidad de Carabobo, VenezuelaAdriana Romero GonzálezCentro de Investigaciôn en Ciencias de la Salud del Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), México