Expérience, représentations et structuration sociale de la folie
Mercredi, juillet 20th, 2005Trois articles � signaler dans deux parutions récentes :
Sociology of Health & Illness
Volume 27, No. 5, July 2005
Helen Lester et Jonathan Tritter
“”Listen to my madness”: understanding the experiences of people with serious mental illness”
This article explores the salience of disability theory for understanding the experiences of people with serious mental illness. Drawing on data from a focus group study, we suggest that users experience both impairment (as embodied irrationality) which can, in itself, be oppressive, and also have to manage their lives within a largely disabling society. We outline some of the strategies adopted by users to manage their situation and ensure they access and receive health services, and illustrate how these are a result of the complex relationship between disability and impairment. We suggest that using a framework of the social model of disability provides a useful way of understanding and making sense of the experience of users with serious mental illness.
Anthropology & Medicine
Volume 12, Number 2, August 2005
Anna Lavis
“‘La Muse Malade’,1 ‘The Fool’s Perceptions’2 & ‘Il Furore dell’Arte’3: An Examination of the Socio-cultural Construction of Genius through Madness”
The cultural interplay of madness and genius is entrenched in, although not exclusive to, Western intellectual tradition. In order to trace both their reflection of and influence on each other, this paper seeks to rupture the alliance of these terms with their clinical ‘pseudonyms’ of mental illness and creativity. Drawing on preceding psychiatric research, as well as both literary criticism and anthropological theory, this paper traces the patchwork of metaphors and cultural imaginings that make up the genius/madness myth—the socio-cultural construction of genius through madness. With particular focus on the cyclical processes of cultural mythmaking it tracks the elements of this construction, initially diachronically, and then through psychiatry and its effect on social thought. Finally, an assessment of the social implications of this myth illustrates that not only is genius socio-culturally constructed through madness but that madness itself is also fabricated through genius in the binding circularity of societal mythmaking. The paper argues that this socio-cultural construction legitimates and elevates, shackles and constrains, having societal implications far beyond the reaches of its own confines.
Els van Dongen
“Repetition and Repertoires: The Creation of Cultural Differences in Dutch Mental Health Care”
This paper explores how culture and cultural differences are created and used to maintain power of definition in mental health care. The author argues that although in mental health care an open approach in care for immigrants is stimulated, cultural differences are strategically used to maintain the status quo of mental health care and mental health professionals. The result is that such strategies keep immigrants in a marginal position. In mental health care, immigrants belong to a classificatory anomaly or, in processual terms, to liminal personae. The author concludes that interaction in mental health care is a manifestation and reproduction of larger class, racial, ethnic and gender conflicts in the broader society.