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Can the future of psychiatry be only political? Volume 93, issue 3, Mars 2017

Author
CH Rouvray, 76301 Sotteville-les-Rouen, France
* Correspondance

The paradigm of Frantz Fanon. Psychiatry was born in the wake of one of the greatest revolutionary movements of all time. It cannot escape its operative constraints via a technique of controlling human beings by using political philosophy. This statement is obviously polemical and I would like to rely on two experiments: that of the ethics committees, as well as the message of Frantz Fanon which can be accessed in the recent publication of his psychiatric writings.

The ethics of care in psychiatry has changed from one model to another: first the model of access to citizenship of the mentally ill thanks to Pinel's liberating efforts, then the model of the freedom of the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s, and finally the current model of risk management. These ethical models contaminate the clinical and care the organization.

Similarly, Frantz Fanon illustrates that it is from the phenomenal daily clinical field of practice that the psychiatrist highlights the processes of alienation of the human being without losing oneself in the cultural or worse racial particularities.

Even if the mechanisms of alienation today are more subtle than the brutality of colonization (individualism, acculturation, disaffiliation, etc.), it is important for the clinician to base their therapeutic action on de-alienation as an ethic of freedom. It is also a political act etc.