[Consent in mental health, between semiotic object and figure of psychiatric care]

Working on the question of consent in psychiatry means studying closely the word given by a patient, who, before being mentally ill, is a person with a real human value. It is a question of eliciting consent, of seeking it tirelessly rather than demanding it, so that it never becomes a procedure imposed by the fact of setting a purely formal condition, at the risk of otherwise abandoning it to the power of the psychiatric doctor. This is all the more important as the criterion of free care, including today both free hospitalization and freely deployed outpatient care, remains as an essential benchmark of the therapeutic alliance, the consent of the patient.