The mental health society

Abstract

In this previously unpublished essay based on La société du malaise, Alain Ehrenberg argues that, from a sociological standpoint, mental health constitutes less a health demand than a language for expressing the conflicts and tensions inherent to contemporary societies, in which autonomy has become a social norm. In setting out his descriptive perspective, Ehrenberg begins by refuting what he terms normative approaches, according to which present-day mental health issues stem from the weakening of social bonds and the rise of individualism. He then turns to collective representations of individual autonomy. For the author, between the post-war period and the 1970s, in the context of what was still a disciplinary society, autonomy was a collective aspiration; from the 1980s onward, it became a common condition. Thus, whereas pathology in a disciplinary society was associated with guilt, in a society of autonomy it is expressed as an incapacity to act, marking a shift from traditional psychiatric perspectives towards a society of mental health. Finally, in opposition to the dominant sociological perspective grounded in the notion of social pathology, the author contends that, in the society of autonomy, mental health operates as a language used both to enunciate and communicate the positive and negative aspects of life in society and to comprehend personal afflictions as shared social problems and act on them.