Medical Staff's Social Representation on Elderly with Psychiatric Disorder: Impacts About the Life Project

Abstract

Today, the questioning about the life project of elderly with mental disorders seems not to be a priority of research and politics. Many studies shows that social representation of this specific population are mostly negative. They impact the place of these subjects on their social and community integration into the society. The purpose of our research work is to identify the nature of health professional's social representation involved in the accompaniment of these subjects. In that case, the authors aim to identify it impact on their life project. Consequently, the authors interviewed 715 professionals (doctors, psychologists and nurses) with the free association method of Abric. A prototypical and categorical analysis was conducted with the help of IRAMUTEQ software. Then a factorial analysis was performed in order to identify which factors could be possibly linked with some dimensions of the social representation we isolated (age, sex, profession and study level). Results shows that social representation of health professionals is really close to the social representation of the rest of population. To conclude, the authors will discuss about the influence and impact of this social representation on the decision process concerning the life project developed by the medical staff in psychiatry

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.