This article discusses in what aspects psychoanalysis might be relevant in the field of mental health and psychopathology. The article begins with a “successful” treatment of a psychotic patient and goes on to consider clinical and administrative proposals regarding “mental illness” whether from the sociological or the biological point of view in contemporary psychiatry. We also discuss the curious alliance between these clinical understandings based on the need to verify the results of the treatment of madness by placing the subject into more tolerant forms of social organization. All of this is in detriment to true listening to what the psychotic is saying, where the truth that his or her discourse might say is neutralized. The position taken here is that psychoanalysis is a discourse committed to accepting the discourse of madness and make it reverberate.
Psychosis; psychiatry; mental health; psychiatric reform