Psychiatric classification has led to the degradation and social segregation of individuals identified as mental patients, thus contributing to a stigmatizing process. The objective of the present study was to determine the emotional symptoms that Nursing teachers consider normal and abnormal, how they perceive themselves within this frame of reference and how they look upon psychiatric treatment. The results showed that the population studied considered the following symptoms to be part of normal day-to-day living: anxiety, discouragement, depression, aggressiveness, anguish, guilt feelings, inferiority and the wish to aggress others; and to be abnormal symptoms, not part of daily life, the following onçs: delirium, hallucinations, obsessive ideas and the wish to kill. They pointed out as symptoms more intensely experienced in daily life: depression, feeling of inferiority, perscution and discouragement. Fifty percent of the participants consider themselves to be equilibrated. Most of them are not in psychoterapy but are thinking about starting psycotherapy. It was concluded that these Nursing teachers are coherent with their responses, presenting a concept of normality within a continuum, and thus investing the concept with a connotation of flexibility and relativity