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Between 1900 and 1939 the regional government in Catalonia discussed a complete reform of the psychiatric institutions inherited from the nineteenth century. The debate was centred on the Spanish government's lack of interest in mental health policies and the growing demand for services. The projects developed between 1900 and 1939 opened a wide-ranging discussion on the role of ethnic and cultural factors in shaping mental illness, and the need to adapt the new facilities to the ethnic features of Catalonia. This study explores the production of Catalan psychiatric discourses and their ideological roots, and the development of public policies up to the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). The paper concludes with a discussion of the influence of pre-war Catalan mental health policies on the wartime practice of psychiatry and, later, on the development of the French psychothérapie institutionnelle after World War II.

This paper shows how the community of Latin-American and Spanish psychiatry represents a solid platform for the so-called 'continental thought' to meet the analytical Anglo-Saxon thought. It reviews what both Latin America and the Spanish and Portuguese languages represent in the American continent; the relation between Spanish psychiatry and Spanish-speaking psychiatry in America during the twentieth century; the reality of psychiatric research and profession in Latin America; the evolution of Spanish psychiatry in the twentieth century from the post civil war diaspora to the beginning of the twenty-first century, and research on mental health in Spain and the foreseeable future.