When mental health care is stigmatizing: A participative study in schizophrenia.

Objectives: Mental health care has been identified as a major source of mental illness stigmatization. Detailed information about these stigmatization experiences is thus needed to reduce stigma in mental health practices. The study aimed to (a) identify the most relevant stigmatizing situations in mental health care encountered by users with schizophrenia and their families; (b) characterize the relative importance of these situations in terms of frequency, experienced stigmatization, and associated suffering; and (c) identify contextual and individual factors associated with these experiences.

Part of the solution yet part of the problem: factors of schizophrenia stigma in mental health professionals.

Background: Stigma is highly prejudicial to persons with schizophrenia, their families, the society and the health care system. Mental health professionals (MHP) are considered to be one of the main sources of schizophrenia stigma.

Objectives: The aim of the study was to identify individual and contextual factors associated with stigma in MHP in its three dimensions (stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination, Fiske, 1998).

[Social representations of psychiatric care in Tunisia].

Background: The progress in the field of the treatment of the mental illnesses is considerable. However, the clinical reality confirms the delay in access to care for numerous patients. This avoidance is due,in big part, to the pejorative representations of the psychiatrics'system care.

[Social representations of the psychiatric diseases in Tunisia].

Background: Nowadays, and thanks to the major transformations experienced by psychiatry, since a half century, we estimate that the perception of the persons with psychiatric disorders would have changed and that they would have acquired the statute of patient with whole share.

Aim: To study social representation of psychiatric diseases in Tunisia.

Methods: Prospective study, based on the socio-anthropological fold of the study "Mental health in general population: images and realities", the social representations associated with "madness", "mental illness" and "depression" in a representative sample of 920 subjects.

[Peer support in a patient organization in psychiatry. Experience and practices].

Mental health patient organizations have only recently found a place among mental health stakeholders. Their activities at an individual level are based on a range of activities involving peer support, including mutual help groups or MHGs (similar to consumer-run organizations). A qualitative study based on an ethnographic approach was conducted in a patient organization at the Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne, where volunteers working in patient organizations receive visitors.