Historical remarks on various western understandings about madness

This paper aims to promote an investigation in which contributions from the most diverse areas of knowledge, including history, the right to psychology and psychiatry, are of paramount importance, regarding the evolution of the concept of madness and the role the madman's social life along the trajectory of Western societies, seeking to clarify how the object of discourse now under analysis was treated at each historical moment, from the social, legal, political and health sciences point of view, until reach the scenario that is presently present, in which the questions related to the psychiatric reform and the antimanicomial fight, as well as those that refer to the autonomy of the subject that lives with some type of mental suffering, gets an increasing prominence.