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Abstract
Background: This paper addresses the question of whether a sociology of mental health is possible. This question raises the issue of the theoretical conditions necessary to establish a sub-field, and requires a debate about the boundaries and epistemological status of such an enterprise.
Aim: To analyse the various historical building blocks and contexts relevant to understanding the contemporary expression and state of a sociological perspective on mental health in France.
Method: Literature review and a current empirical research about the politics of distress and psychoanalysis as case study, used to discuss the genesis and development of French sociological influences from a historical epistemological framework.
Results: The context and limitations of previous social approaches to the study of mental health and suggestions as to the future direction of a sociology of mental health in a French context are discussed, centring around relevant influences and interests.
Implications: The use of an interactionist orientation combined with a critical analysis of psychoanalysis in the context of contemporary social conditions lays the foundation upon which to recapture a sociology applied to mental health.
Declaration of interest: None.
Notes
1 “Tell me how we search for you, I will tell you who you are.” (my translation).
2 See Heinich (Citation2004) for a similar problem with the “sociology of art” with respect to defining an object of study between the “aesthetic” and the “social history of Art”.
3 After Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, “epistemology” in the French academic context doesn't mean “theory of knowledge” but “philosophy of science” from a dynamic perspective, i.e. the history of the constitution of the scientific domain, its objects, concepts and problems.
4 One of the first presentations of “the sociology of mental illness” by John A. Clausen (Citation1959) was classified at the end of a handbook in “selected applications of sociology”. With humility, he had the good sense to note that “the field of inquiry has emerged partly as a consequence of the presence of a social problem” (p. 485).
5 For instance, the role of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in the development of sociological interest in mental health and illness in the United States between 1946 and 1975 was very important (Bloom, Citation2002, pp. 155 – 180).
6 See, for example, Martin (Citation2000).
7 See also Bastide (Citation1950, Citation1972). With the psychiatrist Henri Baruk, he funded the Centre de Psychiatrie Sociale at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) in 1959. See also Toussignant (2002).
8 I have noticed that the famous book of Serge Moscovici (Citation1961) about the social representation of psychoanalyse in France founded a new discipline – social psychology – rather than a new subfield. Subsequently, an important study of deinstitutionalization was undertaken in the 1970s (Jodelet, Citation1989). This was concerned with psychiatric patients experiencing a long stay with a family in the city of Anay-le-château and showed how profane people were developing a symbolic construction of madness as risk of contagion and as a form of stigmatization.
9 Which had already long been in existence (e.g., in the form of the “desalienism” movement) and has existed long after “antipsychiatry” (e.g., with respect to the use of psychoanalysis to “demedicalize” psychiatry) inside the profession in France (Gros, Citation2004, p. 75).
10 Most translation of anti-psychiatry literature occurred between 1975 and 1986 (of the work of Thomas S. Szaz, for instance). This convergence is analysed by Miller (Citation1986; see his chapter, “French historiographies of psychiatry”). In this context, Robert Castel figures as the “specific intellectual” who uses sociology as a critical tool in one field (Foucault, Citation1995).
11 Contrary to how it appears, Castel claims that he did not really use a Foucauldian approach. See an interview on his intellectual trajectory with Gardella and Souloumiac (Citation2004). However his The Regulation of Madness (Castel, Citation1988) starts where Foucault's History of madness stops and has a similar intellectual ambition. For the use and topicality of Foucault's work, see Collectif (Citation2004). For use in the ethnography of psychiatry, see Rhodes (Citation1995, Citation2004), in political sociology of mental health, see Rose (Citation1989).
12 See also Pinell and Zafiropoulos, Citation1978.
13 A review of this work concluded severely that, whilst “interesting,… the book is so polemical and strident in tone, and its evocation of American psychiatry so sketchy and inaccurate, that is difficult to take seriously” (Rhodes et al., Citation1983, p. 5).
14 During the structuralism period, the American sociologist Sherry Turkle studied in Paris the birth and social success of the school of Jacques Lacan as an intellectual movement, from his scission with the orthodox psychoanalytic institution until its dissolution and fragmentation in Lacanian circles.
15 This includes the work of Joseph and Proust (Citation1996) who revive Goffman's work on The insanity of place. My own research, which encompasses fieldwork in a day hospital, comes from this focus.
16 Three axes which encompass quantitative and qualitative empirical studies: the impact of mental health on care organizations; drug-addiction; and psychiatric knowledge and social norms.
17 This perspective implies a critique of the decline of social rules (individualism) and psychiatrization thesis. If Foucault (Citation1975) explained the passage between two regimes of power: sovereignty's society to disciplinary's society (XVIII°-Mid XX°), then the theoretical ambition of Ehrenberg (Citation2003) is to explain the passage to autonomy's society (Mid XX°-XXI°). Let us not forget, though, another solution proposed by Gilles Deleuze (Citation1990): the passage to control's society.
18 And integrating in one framework the three main analytical frames outlined above, analysis of social correlations and social functions are (institutional or critical) tools which can be used by different interest groups or social movements.
19 Until now at least, in France one doesn't need to be a Physician or a psychiatrist to become a psychoanalyst.
20 On “social suffering” see also Fassin (Citation2004b) and Wilkinson (Citation2004).