Folk psychiatry. Psychiatry between a scientific and a popular image

Scientific research in psychiatry is creating a gap in the notions of psychiatry that ordinary people actually possess, similar to the progressive distance between scientific psychology and folk and commonsense psychology. The notions that scientific and folk psychiatry share, and those in which they often differ with counterintuitive aspects, are investigated. After outlining the essential features of the concept of common sense and popular psychology and their most representative theories, the central role that popular concepts play not only in psychiatric theory, in particular in diagnosis, but also in daily practice is underlined. These concepts also involve the image of oneself, of the world and interpersonal relationships, showing the impossibility of a psychiatry that aims to do without the common sense, and the need for a careful mediation with popular psychiatry. This aspect is even more important in practical psychiatry which in many ways is similar to popular psychiatry.