[For a social psychiatry (author's transl)].

The mental patient liberated from his chains, is now considered as a patient resorting to a specialized branch of medicine. So, he has entered into the rigid and compelling structures of the modern medicine. The better he will adapt himself to the medical world, the more easily he will be considered as cured. This approach has the advantage to present madness with a securing image of a disease as plain as the somatic ones. On the other side, it deprives madness of its questioning aspects: relations with social structures, culture habits, problems of the personal and specific experience gained by each patient, questions of borders between mental illness and "normal" behaviours. Mental practice in african societies gives a new approach toward mental illness, demonstrating the value of a collective action through symbolic forms, in the traditional social environment. This approach may give precious indications to be taken into account by the occidental psychiatry.