Los debates en torno a la sanción de la Ley Nacional de Salud Mental 26.657. Ensayo de lecturas e interrogaciones en clave habermasiana

Abstract

The approval of 2010 National Law on the Protection of the Mental Health No. 26,657, and its subsequent regulation in the year 2013, was a historic event in the field of mental health in Argentina. This law is supported on a rights-based approach and in an interdisciplinary perspective, and means a rupture of the medical hegemony in the historical ways of dealing with the issue of madness. In this paper we interrogate the procedures by which this law was approved, on the basis of some theoretical keys offered by the theory of Jürgen Habermas. To do this we recover the verbatim reports of the legislative debates in the Senate, identifying the main topics under discussion, the actors involved and the most relevant interests were at stake. Subsequently, we set some approaches of the Habermasian theory from which we rehearse three lines of questioning the process of debate and enactment of the law under analysis. The first one about the autolegislation of citizens politically autonomous, the second one about the deliberative policy experience, and the third one about the possibilities and limits of the statements in the dialog processes.