The citizenship as form of tolerance

Abstract

We present the conference "The citizenship as form of tolerance", pronounced in 1998, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At the time, Dr Benedetto Saraceno was director of The Mental Health Department of World Health Organization, position occupied until 2010 December. Presently, he is scientific director of Centro Studi Sofferenza Urbana - SOUQ, in Milan, Italy. In this conference, Dr. Saraceno presents a global panorama of impact of mental disorders and their relevance to the debate about public health all around the world. He presents the main groups exposed to rights violation of citizenship and sets the need of these groups to have ability to formulate their own demands. He criticizes the logical of biomedical model, characterized by be linear, individualized and ahistorical, and discusses the clear determinism resulting from this model: the simplification of suffering and the imprisonment of who is in suffering in one only identity, the sick person. From this critique, he points a necessary transformation: the production of a global approach of disease and health that incorporates the theoretical models and the intervention practices, making them more articulated, interdisciplinary and innovative, and that allows everyone the construction of contexts of diverse identities. In this direction, he sets the citizenship as inescapable context of any treatment, citizenship as right itself: sum of rights and identities, positives and negatives. He invites us to think tolerance as constant exercise of assertion of rights, instead of simply acceptance of diversity.