A Mercantilização dos Transtornos Mentais: vicissitudes e desafios da saúde mental nas Redes Sociais

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7213/psicolargum.44.124.AO01

Abstract

This article's main objective is to reflect on the process of commodification of mental health in the social media arena. Using the method of virtual ethnography, we observed the spread of pathologizing and medicalizing discourses, primarily anchored in biological materialism, to shape a mental health market that capitalizes on the production of illness through the repetitive and exacerbated dissemination of specific information about psychiatric disorders. Furthermore, a Mental Disorder Industrial Complex is being structured through social media, whose driving force is virtual communication devices. This proposal is part of a broader postdoctoral research project, through which we verified the magnitude of social media's impacts on mental health. The transversality and transdisciplinarity of this study enable us to reach crucial tools for the construction of a pluralistic ethics of care, from the perspective of Psychosocial Care, aiming to overcome the medicalization, pathologization, and commodification of diagnoses disseminated and exploited on social media.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Luciana Jaramillo Caruso de Azevedo, PUC-Rio

Especialista em psicoterapia de família e casal (PUC-Rio)
Mestre em psicologia clínica (PUC-Rio)
Doutoranda em psicologia clínica PUC-Rio

Published

2026-03-30

How to Cite

de Azevedo, L. J. C. (2026). A Mercantilização dos Transtornos Mentais: vicissitudes e desafios da saúde mental nas Redes Sociais. Psicologia Argumento, 44(124), 1357–1367. https://doi.org/10.7213/psicolargum.44.124.AO01