The history of humanity has registered conventions about illness and treatment, in a dialectics that is mediated by material and objective conditions, where health practices can be identified. In the field of mental health, conceptions of psychic sickening and therapeutics can be identified in different periods of political and economic development and in the organization of human society, since the origin of times to the contemporary period. This article proposes a connection between health/mental illness process comprehension and treatments, referring to the historical contexts in which they were/are registered and searches for the meaning of practices and their current social meaning.
psychiatric nursing; history; trends