December 2017

Des Histoires pour une Histoire : Polyphonie de la Psychiatrie

This project evolved from an acknowledgement, shared by practitioners and researchers working in the field of mental health: the transmission of professional skills fails to account the oral narrative and the historical context of the psychiatry in the French speaking part of Switzerland.

This project aims to make students, professionals and the general public aware of the complexity of psychiatry, through a documentary support with "filmed portraits", which reflect the variety of actors in the psychiatric field (eg nurses, architects, psychiatrists, patients, occupational therapists, pharmacists, neuroscientists, historians, etc.).

This project seeks:

(a) to value the importance of oral transmission in the psychiatric field (b) to show the various issues of practicing psychiatry, at an historical level, in therapeutic knowledge, in stories and in mental health policies.

We work with two partners, IUHMSP (Institute of History of Medicine) and Facteur (i) Interfaculty Research Group of the University of Lausanne.