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Voice-Hearers and Highly Sensitive People Reversing the Stigma of Madness: Dissolving, Stating, or Valuing the Difference?

par Marquis, Nicolas ;Maignan, Alex;Daelman, Chloé
Référence Education, Parenting, and Mental Health Care in Europe: The Contradictions of Building Autonomous Individuals, Taylor and Francis, page (237-252)
Publication Publié, 2024-01

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Résumé :

This chapter focuses on two labels, “voice-hearers” and “highly sensitive people”, that have recently gained a foothold in France and French-speaking Belgium. Despite their different origins, these two labels share an attempt to move away from the pathological model. To do so, they tend to reframe a particular kind of (mental health) experience as clues to an alternative way of being. The chapter analyses the issues these movements are facing, particularly regarding the qualification, the meaning, and the valuation of these “different experiences”. The emergence of these labels has to be understood against the background of a changing French institutional context regarding disability and mental health, which creates practical tensions between a constructivist and a more naturalistic stance. Finally, the chapter highlights how these movements reallocate responsibility for difficulties and suffering between a society perceived as normative and pathogenic and an individual endowed with a potential to develop against these norms. As such, these elements are clear examples of ways of addressing personal difficulties in a society where autonomy is a common condition and of taking them as opportunities to differentiate oneself from others.