L’influence de l’identité linguistique et de l’âge sur la représentation sociale des services de santé mentale chez les personnes dites dépressives.

This article studies the social representation of mental health services for depressive individuals in a Francophone minority setting in Canada. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 44 Francophones and Anglophones from Moncton, Ottawa, Sudbury and Winnipeg who had experienced a depressive episode. The lexical analysis completed by integrated content analysis highlighted three main sociocognitive schemas of the social representation of the services, which affect the social acceptability of mental health services of Francophones living in minority settings: 1) the impersonal nature of the expertise of health professionals, 2) the medical facet of the depressive identity, and 3) the perceived loss of control in the context of care. The social acceptability of mental health services is also discussed in terms of the configuration of the social representation of services based on age.