[A step-by-step recovery]

A patient retraces her care pathway with authenticity and emotion. While her memories of her time in hospital are still raw, her path towards recovery was built on constructive stages and encounters, from one structure to another, towards refound freedom. An interview with Marie-Paule Chanel.

["The family should be prepared to play a role"]

With the onset of mental illness, families become disorientated. Lack of information, misunderstanding and poor clinical orientation are all challenges faced. The families must be, wherever possible, linked to health care, decisions and projects. Interview with Hervé Mignotte, volunteer at the National Union of families and friends of ill and / or mentally handicapped patients (UNAFAM).

[Supporting family carers in psychiatry]

The families of patients with psychiatric disorders are often ill-informed of the consequences of the condition of their loved one. The therapeutic alliance between the family and caregiving team enables the patient to derive the maximum possible benefit from remaining longer at home.

[Management, a containment tool]

Healthcare managers, in partnership with a doctor, are responsible for the care project, the coherence of the care activities and the cohesion of the team. Their managerial role means they need to be receptive to and contain the feelings of the team, as well as take an active part in the psychological containment approach used with the patient.

[The onset of illness: "it will blow over"]

The onset of the illness of a friend or family member does not always present strong clinical signs such as acute and transient psychotic disorder. It is sometimes insidious. For families, this period is punctuated with fears and hopes. Delusional disorders turn familiar reference points on their head and although the first contact with the universe of the psychiatric hospital remains painful, the institution can be reassuring for families. This article presents a moving testimony of a parent and member of the French National Union of the Friends and Families of Mental Health Patients (UNAFAM).

[Suffering, pain and care]

While psychic pain is linked to melancholy, to the loss of an object, psychological suffering indicates difficult affective phenomena, which are not necessarily connected to a personality structure or to a particular pathology, but which can be explained by the very nature of our humanity.

[Psychiatric nursing training and experience: a mutual structure]

Since the beginning of the 20th century, four generations of study curriculums for psychiatric nurses have been implemented successively. Since 1992, the proportion of training dedicated to psychiatry has been steadily decreasing and is likely to lead to a risk of insufficiency as regards the psychiatric practice of future nurses. A master specialization would appear to be necessary.