Ethnoepidemiology and mental health: insights from Latin America

Urbanization and mental health as a research problem in Latin America (with a focus on Brazil)

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

The basic hypothesis of this paper is that, in Latin America, the nature of the set of variables or determinants regarding the relationships of urbanization (and correlated processes of social change, modernization, acculturation, and economic inclusion) and mental health varies with the political context or historical phase considered. To assess the validity of the hypothesis, I propose a periodization of the economic, political, and social changes that occurred in Latin America in the past decades.

RECENT FINDINGS

A brief review of recent studies on social determinants of mental health (with a focus on Brazil), considering research findings by historical context, shows that urbanization-modernization-migration variables were more present in the literature in the decades of 1980 and 1990, whereas social inequity factors (gender, ethnicity/race, and racism) came to be dominant as a research question after the year 2000.

SUMMARY

New approaches of the mental health situation of peripheral societies such as those in the Latin American continent have gone beyond the urban environment as a determinant and start to consider social determination processes and political contexts.