Aesthetic-Cultural Experiences in Mental Health. Fragments of a Public Health Research Study.

Abstract

This article presents research on artistic and cultural practices carried out in 2022–2023 with the support of the Research Directorate in Health, Ministry of Health of the Nation. From a socio-critical perspective, the study explored the creative processes and cultural experiences of people with subjective suffering who participate in four group settings at a public mental health hospital in the central-eastern region of the country. Through interviews, observations, and analysis of institutional documents, it examined how these experiences persist in everyday life and relate to life projects. The article proposes a dialogue with theories that reframe the everyday and aesthetic experience as transformative events, not restricted to the field of legitimized art. Three interrelated dimensions were identified: the aesthetic, the socializing, and the projective. Taken together, these dimensions enable the imagining of sensitive, plural, and vital ways of inhabiting the world. The study concludes that these practices—far from being reduced to a mere therapeutic resource—are instituting devices that challenge biomedical logics, constitute a field of meaning production, and open pathways toward a more dignified life. In a context of increasing hostility, these experiences become a gesture of resistance and underscore the need to design public policies that recognize the aesthetic as a constitutive dimension of health, subjectivity, and the commons.