Health: "Sector psychiatry, public or associative, is in fact disappearing"

 In a forum for "Le Monde", sector psychiatrist Benjamin Weil reacts to the holding, on September 27 and 28, of the Psychiatry and Mental Health Conference which, according to him, gave pride of place to neuroscientific approaches, neglecting "the question of the psychological suffering of people", and those who take care of it on a daily basis.

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 the Conference on Mental Health and Psychiatry , of which the psychiatrists knew nothing about the organization, during which the words science and progress were only associated with neuroscientific approaches, it is especially necessary to underline the collapse of scientific rigor. We must fear the consequences of the disappearance of the 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.

There is no doubt that 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.