CV Science

Philippe Le Moigne PhD Sociology . Research Folllow at INSERM

Course and current status

I joined Inserm (French Institute of Health and Medical Research) in 2001, in the context of my work on the consumption of psychotropic drugs in the general population. I contributed to the creation of the CESAMES  (Research Center for Psychotropic Drugs, Mental Health and Society)- and of the INSERM Unit 611 where I was responsible for the research axis entitled Action in mental health. Therapies, professions, care.

In 2010, I joined the CERMES3 (U988) where I developed my work on suicide and its prevention, starting from voluntary drug intoxication, and the measurement of mental disorder.

Scientific summary

- Prescription and consumption of psychotropic drugs (anxiolytics, hypnotics, antidepressants) in the general population. This work focused in particular on identifying social factors of consumption (age, sex, marital status, social position, level of education, area of residence) based on the mapping of Social Security data, and field surveys of general practitioners and their patients by questionnaire or interviews.

- Suicide attempts, their management and prevention. Suicide attempts are in most cases the result of voluntary drug intoxication by ingestion of psychotropic drugs and are, for the most part, managed by general emergencies, with a recurrence rate of 25% within 4 years. My work sought to understand the nature of their care within the hospital and why the hospital was not able to control this recidivism rate. It also sought to understand why suicide attempts are essentially female, whereas suicide remains predominantly male in Western countries, and why they concern women in the prime of their lives as well as adolescents.

- The history and epistemology of methods in psychiatry. I have attempted to study the stages which led between 1950 and 1980 to the formation of the Standardised Evaluation in psychiatry, through the association of the classification tradition of disorders and the psychology of tests. The aim here was to understand the logical organization of the resulting repertoire of scales, some of which were intended for diagnosis and others for measuring the evolution of disorders under therapy. Then, the clinical relevance of these tools in the diagnosis of depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders was discussed. Finally, I tried to study the effects of their use on the therapeutic relationship in the case of Alzheimer's disease in particular.

- The evaluation of autonomy. From tools to their uses. My project now consists in extending the analysis of the instrumentation used in health diagnosis and expertise to the tools used in the evaluation of autonomy, in the policies dedicated to the disabled and the elderly. The aim is to study the logical organization of evaluation tools, and in particular the implicit definitions of autonomy to which they refer, as well as their use in situations where decisions are to be made about rights, allowances or service provision for these populations, particularly at home.