Approaches to Mental Health in Primary Health Care. Contributions from a Practice of Matrices Support

Abstract

This article proposes a reading regarding the matrices practices of mental health in the field of primary health care in the city of Rosario. We have recuperated information obtained in a research carried out in the period 2016–2017. Based on the analysis and description of a specific device that performs this type of approaches we try to know about the matrix support in the field of mental health in our city and to analyze how it could allow us to link the mental health approaches of the primary health care with different institutions and organizations, strengthening health networks and their necessary intersectoral linkages. Various organizational modes of the teams that make up the device were found referred –as their protagonists tell us–, to unclear designs in the planning of this device as part of policy strategies in Mental Health. However, in the heterogeneity of the registered practices, it was possible to find meeting points: 1) impact on institutional care models by promoting interdisciplinary spaces for the review of care strategies with the teams of health centres, 2) think about and promote other possibilities to accommodate mental health problems by opening spaces to and with the community, 3) intersectoral coordination and, 4) question the differences between a clinical care model that only deals with the symptom from conventional devices, –reducing the subject to a biomedical practice–, and the community care which, on the contrary, considers the specific demand as an opportunity to carry out a population reading which can create strategies of territorial and collective approach betting on the clinic of subjectivity and collective mental health from a human rights perspective.