Actitudes públicas hacia situaciones desviadas de la vida diaria

The public attitudes towards psychiatric treatment and psychotropic medication was analysed in a study which took place in Geneva with a sample of 324 people between the ages of 20 and 75 years old. Confronted with the description of deviant situations which could take place in everyday life, the public considers first of all about recurring to a psychiatrist, whose role in relation to the deviant behaviour thus seems very important. Assistance by a doctor, a confident or a psychologist is also considered. Medication is rarely mentioned. The preference for a certain type of intervention is rooted in the attitudes and in the most general representations of the interviewed subjects and is frequently related to their social and cultural characteristics. Resort to a psychiatrist is linked to the socially visible behaviour and which may disturb. In contrast, the possible seriousness of the signs of seclusion, which would without doubt worry the psychiatrists, is underestimated by the public. Two categories of subjects, which present very different characteristics in their social and cultural attributes and in their attitudes and representations, consider it appropriate to frequently resort to psychiatric help. Although resorting to a doctor is quite unspecific, choosing to confide in a confident seems to reflect the confidence in oneself engendered by the highest social status, social integration and a certain knowledge of the field. The people who consider psychological help do not express socially restrictive attitudes towards the mentally ill. In the etiology of the of the psychiatric disorders they identify in particular the weight of the factors linked to socialisation (lack of affection by the parents) and exclude other factors, whether biological, psychosocial or supernatural.