ABSTRACT
In day-to-day clinical practice, attention to the professional lives of patients—to the role played by work in their lives, their mental functioning, the deterioration of their health or their recovery—is not a given for psychiatric care providers. The absence of job-related issues in a patient who consults for temporary psychic decompensation, and whose state of health does not appear to necessitate sick-leave, may even result in any questioning about work being disregarded completely. Gradually, Mrs B. Jeannine realises that “if she is functioning like this, including at work” this is not because some cognitive disorder of indeterminate origin is impacting upon her capacity for work, but rather because her work’s new organisational modalities are dismantling her cognitive skills, now outside of work too. Jeannine is no longer satisfied with, and even less proud of, this fragmented work, of which she can no longer see the end, of which she no longer has a view of the bigger picture.
