This study aims to discuss and to conceptualize the category innovation, in order to support the construction of innovative practices and multidimensional evaluation models in mental health. Innovation, a term very used in areas such as management, technology and in the hard sciences in general, is here reconfigured as process, pointing to movements of change, potentiating the emergence of new modes of interaction, news paradigms of knowledge and practices, whose character is to overcome previous logic, then considered traditional. Based on review and subsequent dialogue with the literature concerning mental health and the concept of innovation in this field, it is proposed to incorporate the epistemic dimensions, ethical-political and ecological dimensions as essential elements to building practices and models of mental health care as well as proposals aimed to evaluate innovations. The epistemic dimension includes the necessary recognition of the disease in its existential dimension of suffering, overcoming the traditional taxonomy and nomenclature which tells us little or nothing about the man, his life and the socio-historical conditions of their suffering. The ethical-political dimension understands the need to define mental health concepts covering transformative practices of social reality, incorporating a groupality, a category based on the circularity of care, creativity and social awareness. And finally, the ecological dimension means opening towards reconnecting with the cultural, cosmic and the transcendent, favoring processes that overcome the alienation and facilitate the development of personal and collective empowerment.
innovation; mental health; health care; collective health; public health