Search results

France, once a pioneer in psychiatry, is now sinking as its population faces major mental health challenges. This includes the 12 Million French individuals with psychiatric conditions, the lack of appropriate structures and the shortage of skilled mental health professionals, but it also leaves families in critical situations. The purpose of this study is to explore the carers’ caregiving experiences and to suggest ways to organise educational programmes to support mental health carers in France.

The research was conducted from January 2018 to November 2019. It included French carers of patients with mental conditions. Recorded semi-structured interviews were used and findings were analysed through an inductive thematic analysis and regrouped into key themes.

Participants had overwhelming negative representations of “mental illness”. The fact that they were excluded from participating in the patient’s health management further added to their misconceptions around mental disability, it limited their communication with their family and amplified their burdens.

There is an urgent need for carer empowerment; carers should be included in educational programmes, they should benefit from French Government subsidies and social-network assistance and receive quality assistance by trained mental health professionals. The critical situation of carers can only be addressed by combining these three steps and through the action of appropriate actors in the field of mental health, thus alleviating the current paradigm of psychiatric care in France.

Thousands of research papers regarding carers have been published in other countries. In addition yet, to the knowledge, only a few investigations on French mental health carers have been conducted to this day. The singularity of this research lies in the rare individual interviews, which provided us with first-hand testimonies of mental health carers in France. This data could be of vital aid for professionals and for policymakers when advocating for better support of carers in mental health.

In 2016, Santé publique France launched for the first time “Moi (s) Sans Tabac,” a positive social marketing campaign inspired by Public Health England’s “Stoptober” campaign, the aim being to trigger mass quit attempts among smokers. Both programs include a mass-media campaign, national and local cessation help interventions, and the diffusion of various tools to help smokers quit. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the two programs’, specific national contexts and to describe resulting similarities and differences regarding campaign development.

A contextual analysis was performed to determine differences between the two countries regarding smoking prevalence, health services and culture.

Smoking prevalence is about twice as high in France as in the UK, leading to a lower degree of de-normalization of smoking. Moreover, cessation support services are much more structured in the UK than in France: all health professionals are involved and services are located near smokers’ residences.

Campaign progress and cessation tools provided during both campaigns are quite similar. However, Santé publique France needed to adjust the British model by favouring a regional smoking prevention network and by building an innovative partnership strategy to reach the target.

The results could be useful for other countries that wish to develop a smoking cessation campaign based on the same positive messaging at local and national levels.

This study investigates a particular food practice which takes place in the playground at school: the afternoon snack. During this special moment, children are free to share and swap their snacks, according to their affinities. The study aims to demonstrate how this food consumption is part of the process of children's socialization.

This paper relies on an ethnographic study of children's behaviour during snack time. Two primary schools representing two different social backgrounds are compared. Pupils are aged from six to ten years. The systematic review of children's snacks during a three-month observation period in each school allowed the author to transform the qualitative observations into quantitative data.

The trading of snacks between children gives rise to entire networks, strategies of exchange and sometimes even snacks theft. The food exchanges act as an indicator of social relationships between the kids. In this regard, snack time teaches us even more about children's behavior and socialization. There are two reasons for that, the first one is that the products consumed are chosen, either by the parents or the children themselves and has nothing to do with the lunch served by the school. The second one is that it is a particularly pleasant moment for them, as it is a time for sweet food shared with their peers.

This is a limited monograph of the snacking behaviour of 20 children with the highest attendance to afterschool study.

The originality of that study is to focus on a space-time and a school food practice that are not often investigated by researchers.