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Discourse and Mental Health is structured as a patchwork of articles presenting the results of action research conducted by Juan Eduardo Bonnin. For 5 years, Bonnin studied the discursive practices and strategies deployed by patients and professionals in a public hospital in an immigrant neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His research led him to observe, among other things, inequalities in access to healthcare services, negotiations throughout the diagnosis process, and the diversity of care options. The book's introductory chapter sets out its main goal: to construct the theoretical, methodological, and critical point of view of "Latin American Discourse Analysis" (LADA). LADA aims to be an analytical and political alternative to the dominant European and North American perspectives of discourse analysis that, according to the author, practice grammatical description and apply social action theory to all contexts in a classical fashion, dismissive of local particularities. Rather than a static theoretical framework, LADA intends to become a community that shares a perspective on the social use of language which not only inquires into its specificity . . . but also observe[s] how it deals with conflict, shapes social representations, produces and reproduces identities, regulates the linguistic space or intervenes in shaping, replicating or transforming both political entities and power relationships. (p. 2) Chapter 1 opens with a case study on the first interaction between a new Paraguayan patient and an Argentinian psychologist. The stakes of this interaction are no less than the admission to the hospitalthis is why patients are also candidates to some extent. Not only does this exchange display a situation marked by linguistic asymmetry and social inequality, but its analysis also reveals the impact that the clinical interpretation of sociolinguistic realities can have, notably, on access to treatment. The expression of a biographical trajectory, feelings, and emotions, what Bonnin calls the "(unexpected act of) voice," is observed at the microlevel as one of the visible effects of successive global linguistic and cultural policies in Argentina. Bonnin criticizes contemporary uses of the Foucauldian approach, which tend to uniformize data to make them fit with large, abstract analyses. Bonnin wants to resolve this problem by adding more sources of theoretical inspiration, such as Bakhtin's theory of enunciation and the "theory of emerging grammar" that inspired Volosinov's work. He intends to access discourses in their "interactional" (neither individual nor social) and "emergent" (neither abstract nor predetermined) dimensions. Since these theoretical statements are at the core of LADA, Bonnin argues that changes, resistances, and agency are not exceptions but constitutive dimensions of any utterance. He advances in particular that for discourse analysis to account for linguistic inequalities in a public health context,

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Chef du service de gériatrie d’un hôpital parisien, le Pr. A. a pour habitude de produire un objet de référence commun pour décrire la maladie d’Alzheimer à ses patients en recourant à la description d’une maison dont l’escalier endommagé ne permet pas d’accéder aux pièces de l’étage supérieur, symbolisations de leurs facultés intellectuelles préservées. Le médecin mobilise à cet effet diverses ressources sémio-discursives, qu’il combine principalement avec des gestes iconiques à valeur métaphorique, pour accomplir l’activité descriptive et organiser son tour de parole. Ce sens métaphorique réside dans l’incongruité sémantique partielle observable lors de la performance multimodale entre schématisation conventionnelle des gestes et schématisation de l’expression verbale affiliée. Par cette mise en scène verbale et gestuelle, le gériatre cherche à transmettre et faire partager de façon didactique un savoir médical, tout en laissant le patient libre d’accorder crédit à sa métaphore visant à expliquer la maladie dont il est atteint.