After having defended a sociology dissertation in 2007 at the EHESS on the reforms of psychiatric hospitals in France between the 1870s and 1980s, I was hired as a research fellow at the CNRS in 2010. Since then my research has explored the changes in psychiatric chronicity since the latter third of the twentieth century, at the crossroads of the changes in biomedicine and social policies, using a variety of approaches: ethnography, questionnaire-based surveys, interviews, and archives. My particular interests have been in: the history of movements of the families of mental patients and their role in shaping medical and social policies for persons suffering from psychiatric disorders (mental disability); changes in the concept of therapy under the influence of the introduction of psychotropic chemotherapies; the reforms of laws relating to guardianship; and the development of protection of individuals. I am currently coordinating a French-German project with Volker Hess on the development of early interventions among persons with a very high risk of psychosis.
