Tribune. Psychiatry is disappearing in favor of mental health. It is an observation shared by the greatest number, that they see in this evolution a solution or a problem. Mental health is organized into two coordinated poles: a political understanding of the psychic fact on the scale of public health, of the great number and a scientific understanding exclusively nourished by neurosciences.
Obviously, we can find the disappearance of the issue of the suffering of our patients, which is the basis of our commitment, unbearable. Of course, we must say our exasperation at the disdain of the supervisory authorities for the work of the psychiatric sector which treats the overwhelming majority of serious psychiatric disorders in France, with all the more success since it is supported by the social environment of patients and local political actors.
But, in the aftermath of Mental health and psychiatry foundations, of which the psychiatrists knew nothing of the organization, during which the words science and progress were associated only with neuroscientific approaches, it is especially necessary to underline the collapse of the scientific rigor. We must fear the consequences of the disappearance of epistemological concern, that is to say of the question of the purpose of the science that we produce, of its structure and of what it is determined by.
No doubt the sector is expensive
The reduction of the psychic fact to its neurobiological and behavioral manifestations, the search for compatibility between this knowledge that we create and economic knowledge, the total disappearance of the question of subjectivity in the deafening silence of psychiatric science: this is the point. more worrying. It is no longer a question of a conceptual confrontation, it is a question of observing academic psychiatry accepting to produce a science such as is hoped for today on the side of the supervisors.
A science that neglects subjectivity, the continuous, the informal and suffering. In short, a real science of neoliberalism. There is no doubt that the sector is expensive. It is indeed necessary to have real teams, duly trained to welcome or go to meet the psychological suffering in which it is found. There must be many to offer each of our patients to listen to them, to offer each of them the creation of a link from one subject to another.
Because it is, from experience and according to research, to say the least serious, of the human sciences of the XXe century, which heals. On the grounds that this practice, essential for the most seriously ill, those who suffer the most, can no longer find anyone to defend its conceptual foundations with political decision-makers, it is disappearing.
You have 31.13% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.