I am french. I am currently living abroad but I have been living in France for most of my life. I have only just found out that I probably have AS, and I am glad I was in the UK when it happened. But I have some experience with the french mental health structure. I have been treated for depression and anxiety, and although I never went to the hospital some people close to me did. I can try to summarize the way I understand the problems there.
In my opinion the two main roots of the mental health problems in France are psychoanalysys and medication, or more exactly the abusive use of both.
I have nothing in itself against psychoanalytical methods as a therapeutic tool. It is not science, but it can be helpful. Analysing his own past and construction are useful, the way you grow up obviously influences much of who you are, and understanding it can be very insightful to understand and improve yourself. That much simply looks obvious to me, and it is true for both autistic and neurotypical people, although the introspection process is probably different. The problem is that many french psychologists (and many psychiatrists) will *only* use those theories, not only as therapeutic tools but also as a general pseudo-scientific framework. On the individual basis of a therapist-patient relationship, it leads at best to nothing and at worst to much suffering for everyone involved. On a more general level for the mental health community, the bigotic and rigid adherence of those professionals to a set of beliefs that has no roots in real experience gets them more and more connected to each other, and less and less connected to the outside world (both patients, professionals with other methods, and the general public). This is roughly the same working principles as a cult: the world view of the affected persons puts them together with the other affected people and apart from the rest of the world, and they only grow more and more deluded as they receive support and positive feedback from their fellow believers and rejection and negative feedback from the rest of the world. And many people with ASDs and other conditions are victims of those delusions.
I also want to stress that while I write about a general and serious problem, it in no way describes all french mental health professionals. You also have people using various other methods, as well as professionals who use psychoanalysis but don't rigidly stick to it and are open to other approaches.
The other problem, medication is caused by two factors: mental hospital doctors, and GPs. France is one of the countries with the highest anxiolytic consumption in the world, and it used to among the first for antidepressants too (it is not the case any more, according to recent studies). The problem is that most of those drugs are given by general practicioners, and as a result many depressed or anxious patients are never referred to specialists. The GPs probably mean well but I believe most of them are not competent enough to regulate that kind of treatment (prescribing the right antidepressant is complex to say the less, and anxiolytics are potentially dangerous drugs with a high potential for abuse and addiction), and anyway efficiently treating a mental condition is not just giving pills. The problem in hospitals is that many of them are run by extremely incompetent and "old-school" psychiatrist who haven't changed the way they work for 30 years. And the way they work is usually just giving anxiolytics and other "regulating" drugs until the person is so anesthezied and exhausted it is not a "problem" any more, and then sending them out. (Many are soon back in, as you may guess, and it goes on again.) To be fair, mental hospitals also dramatically lack funding and don't have the money to hire younger, talented people and to develop modern therapies ; the french public health system is good overall but mental health is completely neglected. (The situation is much better in private institutions but they are few and most people can't afford them.)
Another consequence of the psychoanalysis problem is that opposing bigotry tends to turn you into a bigot yourself if you are not careful, and that is indeed what happened to some opponents of psychoanalysis in France. Those opponents are neuroscientists, neuropsychiatrists, cognitive scientists and cognitive-behavioral therapists, whose approaches are completely different from psychoanalysis. They got so violently attacked by the psychoanalytical world for questioning their world view that many of them became violent and closed-minded themselves. The two factions are now violently antagonizing, the cognitivist accusing the psychoanalysts of being worthless charlatans with no theories and no results, and the psychoanalysts accusing the cognitivist of seing people as identical robots and neglecting individual personalities and histories. It leads to people doing politics and not science, or even worse to politics influencing science. It also causes a unhealthy amount of paranoia among mental health professionals ; as some people previously noticed in this thread it durably hampered the work on other approaches, notably any non-psychoanalytical work on developmental and environmental factors (most psychoanalysis will reject it for not being psychoanalytic, and most cognitive science will reject it for being too psychoanalysis-like).
That is what the french mental health system looks like for me. The two factions fight each other through journal articles, web sites, open letters, petitions, reports and political influence (to the point where it becomes difficult to find anything in French on those subjects that doesn't contain a covert or overt political agenda ; it is extremely annoying when you are just looking for information). On each side you have deluded bigots and more open-minded people who do their best to be good clinicians. The uncompetent and dangerous doctors in mental hospital make the very phrase "mental health" a bad joke in most of those places. I can't blame the GPs, I can't say they are doing well but I think the reason why they give those drugs is because all that chaos has understandably made medical doctors and the general public very suspicious and afraid of the whole mental health system.
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ouroboros
A bit obsessed with vocabulary, semantics and using the right words. Sorry if it is a concern. It's the way I think, I am not hair-splitting or attacking you.
18 Jun 2013, 6:13 am
I've often wondered what it would be like to move to France or some other part of Europe. I think I'll cross France off my list and look at the UK or one of the Scandinavian countries instead. 
