[The human factor in politics : applications in the field of mental health.]

The author describes the different stages in the construction of governmental policies emphasizing specifically the way the policies in mental health are being developed in Quebec. In the first section, he analyses the traps encountered in the people's consultations whether made in the framework of a commission's recommendations or otherwise; more precisely, he discusses the problems met by the members of the commission, as in the case of the Rochon commission, in separating the conflicting interests expressed in the different reports. In the second section he discusses the relationships that develop between the consultative committees, like the committee on Mental Health of Quebec and the intra-ministerial services, the relationships of cooperation or of lack of communication based as much on the structural elements as on the planned ones; the communications between the intra-ministerial and the external organisms are analyzed reviewing their implication in the preliminary stages that should lead to a provincial policy in mental health. The last section is given over to a short discussion of two ideas that seem at this time to be the predominant ones in the technocrat's world; the idea of desinstitutionnalization and the idea of multidisciplines in the intervening teams; those ideas are reviewed in regard to the context of the last advice of the Mental Health Committee of Quebec.