Nowadays, family care is a great challenge for Mental Health practice, which requires professionals to study and take a closer look at these social actors. This study, which is guided by a social constructionist and qualitative approach, aimed to get to know the meanings Family Health Program (FHP) professionals attribute to family members living with mentally-ill patients. Data were collected by means of the focus group technique, involving members from two FHP teams in Ilhéus/Bahia, Brazil. As a result, we describe the family members and their conceptual registers, as well as the following meanings: caring, motivating and suffering prejudice; powerless and lacking resources; producing abuse and unbalanced. It was observed that some of these meanings reinforce the community's exclusion of mental patients and their family members, while others oppose this discourse and are thus able to favor a closer approximation between these actors and the professionals, in view of a new practice that improves their living conditions.
family; mental health; nursing