The meanings of emotional ailments in a marginalized community in Mexico City

Abstract

The population's conceptions about health are crucial to the development of any intervention strategy in the field of public health. We are interested in describing the sense adult inhabitants confer on emotional ailments in daily life. We used the Theory of Social Representations as a framework of reference and a multimethod perspective, which will enable us to recover the subjective experience of participants in the study, not only regarding emotional suffering, but also as a means of incorporating their perceptions of pleasurable states into their everyday lives. Finally, we discuss our findings, taking into account the implications of using various methodological strategies to obtain a more integral health approach that proved extremely useful for identifying the felt needs of the population and proposing their inclusion in mental health care programs.