Baptiste Brossard

• PhD
• Faculty Member at University of York

Why does an estimated 5% of the general population intentionally and repeatedly hurt themselves? What are the reasons certain people resort to self-injury as a way to manage their daily lives? In Why Do We Hurt Ourselves, sociologist Baptiste Brossard draws on a five-year survey of self-injurers and suggests that the answers can be traced to social...

Why do some mental illnesses emerge in certain times and places and later disappear? Because it integrates a wide array of social processes and relies on a strong epistemological position, Hacking's theory of ecological niches constitutes the most comprehensive and ambitious attempt to answer this question. However, this theory lacks a convincing d...

Why, in a given society, at a given point of its history, do some individuals design idealized forms of social organization? While utopian studies have focused on analyzing the content of utopias, addressing definitional issues, or understanding the role of utopias in social change, this article proposes to examine the very production of utopias. T...

This article proposes an interactionist approach to self-injury behavior in youth. Mostly based on in-depth interviews with seventy people who self-harm or who have self-harmed at some point in their lives, it describes the process of daily self-injuring. It shows that this practice consists less in the self-harm in itself than in a liminal emotion...

Microsociology has been criticised for universalising ‘the’ interaction order as it occurs among the North American middle classes. A way of addressing this issue lies in historicising interaction: showing how each component of the interaction order has been historically moulded. The present article illustrates this argument with the case of blushi...

Mental health categories can circulate in societies regardless of whether they are recognized by medical professionals. This article asks why some labels are adopted en masse to commonly characterize some forms of distress, while other labels remain confined to specialist spheres. Contrasting with many examples of medicalization, “sex addiction” of...

Can the social sciences explain the emergence of mental disorders in societies or in individuals? This book presents a critical look at sociological explanations of mental illnesses, making the case for their renewal.

Every four years, the US National Intelligence Council (NIC), known for its ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, releases a report outlining the main changes to be expected in the world in the next two decades. Following this tradition, after the election of Joe Biden, a new report was published in March 2021: Global Trends 2040. It includes a...

Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) begins with Connie's psychiatric hospitalization for ‘violent behaviour’. A working class, Latino woman in 1970s US, Connie was ‘violent’ indeed. She violently protected her niece against a pimp – hitting him with a bottle in an attempt to prevent her niece undergoing a forced abortion. Living i...

In my childhood I often happened to see and hear these ‘possessed’ women in the villages and monasteries. They used to be brought to mass; they would squeal and bark like a dog so that they were heard all over the church. But when the sacrament was carried in and they were led up to it, at once the ‘possession’ ceased, and the sick women were alway...

What is wrong with Madame Bovary? In the novel of the same name, Gustave Flaubert portrays the life of a woman in mid-nineteenth century France. The wife of a rural doctor, Emma Bovary struggles with the limitations of her existence. She invests herself in varied activities, navigating uneven mindsets and emotions, hoping to make sense of mundanity...

Anyone familiar with the world of mental health would read Veronika Decides to Die (Coelho, 1998) with some surprise. Veronika, a young woman from Slovenia, whose life appears to be otherwise ‘good’, tries to kill herself. When she wakes up, her psychiatrist tells her that the medicine she took triggered a toxic reaction that has only postponed her...

How do social sciences explain the emergence of mental disorders in societies and in individuals? For instance, can we understand why and how someone becomes ‘schizophrenic’, ‘hyperactive’ or ‘borderline’? Can we explain the mechanisms through which ‘anorexia’, ‘autism’ and ‘anxiety’ emerge as major mental health issues? Are we able to grasp the ca...

Can the social sciences explain the emergence of mental disorders in societies or in individuals? This book presents a critical look at sociological explanations of mental illnesses, making the case for their renewal.

There has been sustained interest in the intersection between social constructs and mental health from diverse disciplines including psychiatry, sociology and public health. However, no systematic attempt has been made to catalogue what is meant by ‘social’ by different researchers, how variables deemed ‘social’ constructs are linked to mental heal...

How do governments commemorate salient national figures with contested reputations? The case of Marshal Philippe Pétain, whose fame followed World War I (WWI), but was later stigmatized for having led the Nazi-affiliated Vichy regime during World War II (WWII), suggests that political leaders consider the interests of competing groups. In the case...

Baptiste Brossard’s 2018 monograph, Why Do We Hurt Ourselves? Understanding Self-Harm in Social Life, reports on his 2006–2011 PhD research into non-suicidal self-injury in France and Canada. Brosssard advances two main arguments: first, that self-injury is a practice of self-control used to preserve the interaction order, and second, that self-inj...

This article presents a methodology designed to study what is considered “social” in research on the topic of mental health. Examining a sample of 289 academic publications, we coded the meanings attributed to “social” and their linkage to mental health. Reflecting on this methodology offers a way to discuss the various uses of the adjective “socia...

The sociological study of intellectual recognition has tended to focus on highly cited and highly acclaimed authors and perspectives, while reserving some interest for those who are “forgotten.” We know much less about the liminal cases: authors who are in-between fame and oblivion. This paper proposes a way to study intellectual recognition, by ex...

This article is the introduction to the special issue ‘Sociology and psychology: what intersections?’ In addition to presenting the articles included in this issue, the present text outlines the general stakes of interdisciplinarity between psychology and sociology. It argues that interdisciplinarity requires a specific conversion work between disc...

This article advocates a certain interpretation of grounded theory for the analysis of interviews with people diagnosed with dementia. Distinguishing itself from the methodological approaches that, closer to thematic analysis, consider the discourses of the participants as “pure symptoms” or “pure meanings,” this interpretation consists in interpre...

This book explores the contemporary relevance of Charles H. Cooley’s thought, bringing together scholars from the US, Europe and Australia to reflect on Cooley’s theory and legacy. Offering an up-to-date analysis of Cooley’s reception in the history of the social sciences, an examination of epistemological and methodological advances on his work, c...

Alors que dans le monde près de 50 millions de personnes (800 000 en France) sont diagnostiquées comme souffrant de la maladie d'Alzheimer ou d'une démence apparentée, un point de vue prévaut : la perspective médicale. Ce livre offre une autre approche, complémentaire et critique. Sociologue habitué à faire du terrain, Baptiste Brossard est entré a...

Contemporary research into health and mental health treats diagnosis as a central step in understanding illness management and trajectory; consequently, in the last two decades, sociology of diagnosis has attained increasing influence within medical sociology. Deeply embedded in social constructionism, the set of research divides between those who...

De nos jours, la notion de réseau occupe une place cruciale dans le système de santé québécois et dans les recherches sociales en santé. Il s’agit à la fois d’un mode d’organisation de services sanitaires et communautaires, d’une méthode d’investigation de ces services et d’une théorie plus générale d’appréhension du monde social. Le présent ouvra...

How do residents' previous social positions influence the ways in which they deal with social life in nursing home? Based on observations and interviews in a private nursing home in France, this article describes daily life in the facility, the disability-based distinctions observed among residents, the strategies they use to “find their place,” an...

Depuis les années 1970, de nombreuses recherches qualitatives publiées en anglais tentent de rendre compte et d’analyser la vie en institution d’hébergement pour personnes âgées. Ces recherches portent sur des questions aussi diverses que les contraintes de travail des employés, les distinctions sociales et « ethniques » au sein des établissements,...

Charles H. Cooley, an unrecognized classic? Introductory notes to the translation of “Social Consciousness” This text is a preamble to the first translation of the article “Social Consciousness,” written by Charles H. Cooley and published in 1907 in the American Journal of Sociology. It first presents the interest of a current translation of this s...

Based on the observation of around seventy memory consultations, this article provides an analysis of cognitive assessment in the elderly in a Goffmanian perspective. During these interactions, patients run the risk of losing their credibility, given that what they say is both solicited by the geriatrician in order to spot potential daily difficult...

The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is internationally the most widely used test in medical practice to screen age-related dementia or in medical researches dealing with this topic. This paper proposes to understand this success through a historical analysis of the test and of its appropriation, especially by medical researchers, geriatricians...

This article proposes an analysis of the role played by emotions in medical consultation. It is based on the comparison of interactions between patients and professionals in two geriatric wards (specialized memory consultations) and in an adolescent day care hospital. Five types of emotion are then distinguished according to their uses : those whic...

EN : This article examines aging using the calendar/journal of an 87-year-old man, a former human resources employee, which he started while living in his own home and continued after moving to a retirement home. Beginning with a critique of approaches to the aging experience, the article analyzes the informant’s writing by resituating it in its so...

A partir d’une enquête de terrain qui lui a permis de recueillir de nombreux témoignages dans un cadre clinique ou via les réseaux sociaux, Baptiste Brossard à chercher à comprendre comment un individu envisage de se blesser, commence à se blesser, recommence, et éventuellement arrête ; comment la vie en société produit chez certains le désir de s’...

Based on fieldwork conducted in a teenage day clinic where the author carried out observations and interviews with patients, this paper takes a sociological approach to psychiatric care. We argue that the therapeutic dimensions of daily life in a hospital can be included in the sociology of psychiatric work. To this end, we describe interactions th...

Acting one’s credibility during memory consultations. The elderly facing cognitive evaluation This article proposes an interactionist approach to memory consultations – consultations where older patients’ cognitive performances are evaluated – through the negotiation of “credibility” of patients. It focuses on strategies that patients develop when...

Disponible en ligne sur le site de la revue (http://www.journal-reset.org/index.php/RESET/)

This article begins with fact : social science researchers today can no longer do their work without using the Internet. Yet very little effort has been made to adapt the qualitative method to this medium. By focusing on instant messaging, it aims to show the possibilities for ethnographic fieldwork opened up by this technology and describe a few o...