Towards a Paradigm of Mental Health Beyond the Brain: Grounding Socio-Political Critique Through a Cybernetic Lens

Abstract

Faced with the global prevalence of mental disorders and a therapeutic turn that privatizes distress, both socio-political critique and the biomedical model have proven insufficient. In this essay, we articulate a theoretical synthesis between enactive psychiatry and the ecosocial-cultural framework that conceives disorders as dysfunctional patterns of sense-making situated in ecosocial niches, operationalized by multilevel explanatory tools (RAP, CLDs, MoBI). From a reflexive cybernetic perspective, we argue that this integration strengthens ontologically, epistemologically and methodologically previous socio-political critique, by explaining how structural elements translate into distress, thus grounding an emerging mental health paradigm resistant to individualizing logics.