An Insider View on the Making of the First French National Information Campaign About Depression

Abstract

The first national public health information campaign on depression – “Depression, know more about it to get out of it” – was implemented in France in 2007, nearly 20 years after the first campaign on this topic was initiated in the United States by the NIMH. The chapter is based on an observant participation by the author, who has been involved in the making of the campaign at all stages and levels of its design and implementation; it will present the multiple logics that occurred in shaping the campaign messages for the general public and health professionals. The chapter will examine the exchanges and documents (e-mails, meetings, forums, successive versions of the final documents…) produced by and between the various stakeholders involved in the design of the campaign during the entire process (experts from different backgrounds, professional associations, government agencies, institutes of quantitative and qualitative surveys, user groups, communication departments and agencies, designers, health professionals of various types, depressed people, general public…) and their contributions to the making of the final content of the campaign. We will particularly highlight how conflicts are negotiated between apparently irreconcilable positions of actors whose ideological presuppositions, professional interests, working methods, and categories of analysis diverge, within a EBM framework strictly imposed by the public health agency supporting the campaign, and the constraints that this whole system imposed on the answer that could be proposed to the original question: “Depression, how to get out of it?”.