Piet Bracke is a Full Professor of Sociology at UGent. Since 2014 he has been Director of the Health and Demographic Research (HEDERA) group at UGent. Presently is the chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of ERIC-European Social Survey. His research focuses on mental health services, sociology of mental health, psychiatric epidemiology, gender and the family, and comparative health sociology.

On 22/03, he participated in the breakoutsession on Economic crisis. The subject of his presentation was Mental health and social inequality: fables and facts.

The impact of social inequality on mental health and access to mental health care is now strongly supported by a cascade of studies. But does that tell us how social inequality "gets under our skin and settles in our heads"? Do we need to know these mediating pathways at all to draw conclusions about the social roots of mental health? Furthermore, many policy preparation and policy evaluation studies point to inequities in access to mental health care. But do we address mental health inequities by focusing on access to care? We question these and other taken-for-granted assumptions in research on social inequality and mental health and argue for a more critical approach.

  • ​You can download the slides below.

Go back to the full program