Cultural standards, power and subversion in cross-cultural psychotherapy.

In a creolizing world, psychotherapy is challenged by the growing influence of cultural standards, systems of meaning and idioms of distress supported by new groups who play a major role in public health policies. While these elements were originally introduced in psychotherapy with ethnic minorities both to improve the patient-doctor relationship and to bring relevant material from patients' cultural background, they also became a way to empower nonwestern patients in western health care systems. When in the 1980s it became possible to readdress the issue of power in psychiatric practice, something had already changed in the social regulation that psychiatry should endorse.

The Survivor's Paradox: Psychological Consequences of the Khmer Rouge Rhetoric of Extermination.

From 1975 to 1979 in Cambodia, during the four years of the Pol Pot regime, the rhetoric of extermination that perpetrators used to legitimize mass murder was a powerful instrument to deprive individuals of their humankind before killing them. Because every human community is founded on a metaphor claiming the inalterability of the social bond beyond the dead, the genocide project aims for its obliteration. By breaking the possible representation of a continuity and a social permanence between the dead and the living, the rhetoric of extermination claims, in a terrifying reality, that the only possible connection between the dead and the living concerns an identical physical condition: the living have already died or will pass away.

An anthropological hybrid: the pragmatic arrangement of universalism and culturalism in French mental health.

As in most European countries, the mental health of immigrants in France has recently been the subject of scientific scrutiny. Since the end of World War II voluntary special mental health services for migrants and refugees have been created in France and especially in Paris, but none has been based on epidemiological data. Generally, this lack of objective data gave rise to the assumption that many immigrants might not be getting the type of services they required.

The rebirth of PTSD: the rise of a new paradigm in psychiatry.

The new conception of psychological trauma that arose in the 1980s with the definition of PTSD in the DSM-III was a major change compared to the previous traumatic neurosis. While the clinical features were in some way similar, the political and sociological meanings of trauma were absolutely different. At that time, the invention of PTSD was much more the consequence of a broad mutation in mentality that introduced a new moral perspective in trauma studies than of a scientific discovery.