Although the French are on the podium of the biggest consumers of psychotropic drugs in Europe, the fear of addiction is widely shared.
Sylvie Fainzang, anthropologist and honorary research director at Inserm, explains why.
LE FIGARO.
- How does the notion of dependence on psychotropic drugs differ between doctors and patients?
Sylvie FAINZANG.
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For doctors, dependence refers to the notions of addiction and drug dependence.
Patients are addicted if they can no longer do without their medication and need to increase the doses to feel the effects.
Practitioners often describe this addiction as a love affair.
Read alsoPsychiatry: putting the drug back in its rightful place
For users, it is more like an arranged marriage: addiction is not only pharmacological, they fear the constraint imposed by taking the drug daily, its long-term toxicity, the loss of their autonomy, enslavement to this object and the colonization of their thought.
The notion of slave...
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