Abstract
Mental health and addiction are broad concepts, covering heterogeneous symptoms and experiences of varying severity and duration, with multiple risk and protective factors and potentially significant consequences for various aspects of people's lives - studies, work, family life . Each situation is specific and subjective, as is also the case in the field of physical health, the particularity of mental health perhaps being the absence of biological measures enabling objective identification of mood variations, levels of dependence on a product or behavior, or the degree of psychological suffering. Research, necessarily based on the subject's own words, therefore faces the difficulty of harmonizing and standardizing intimate feelings. What are the challenges of research into mental health in a population ? Defining the subject under study is, of course, an essential prerequisite to questioning the factors associated with it, and the first question to be tackled is that of the classifications of mental disorders and addictions used today. What do they tell us about what is considered " normal "behavior? The lecture will then look at different types of factors which, on a collective scale, predict the occurrence, severity and persistence of mental health problems and addictions throughout a person's life : family history of mental disorders and addiction, experience of situations of violence - intimate or collective, break-ups and exile - wanted or not, living conditions and links to others. All lectures will address social inequalities in mental health, as well as the issue of preventing mental disorders and addictions on a societal scale.
