Myths of Mental Health: Revelations from the French System for the United States.

Drawing on an analysis of the French mental health system, this essay examines four presumptions about mental health care dominant in the United States: (1) the required abolition of the hospital for psychiatric deinstitutionalization; (2) the substitutability of public and private financing; (3) the importance of a "dangerousness" criterion for involuntary commitment procedures; and (4) the need for an ever-expanding scope of care. These claims hold little weight when subjected to comparative scrutiny, and the essay closes by discussing the implications of these revelations for US mental health care policy and ethics.

Making the City "Second Nature": Freegan "Dumpster Divers" and the Materiality of Morality.

How do people maintain deeply held moral identities in a seemingly immoral social environment? Cultural sociologists and social psychologists have focused on how individuals cope with contexts that make acting on moral motivations difficult by building supportive networks and embedding themselves in communities of like-minded people. In this article, however, the author argues that actors can achieve a moral "sense of one's place" through a habitus that leverages the material dimensions of place itself. In particular, he shows how one community of radical environmental activists make affirming moral identities centered on living "naturally" seem like "second nature," even in a seemingly unnatural and immoral urban environment, by reconfiguring their physical world. The author shows how nonhuman objects serve as proofs of moral labor, markers of moral boundaries, and reminders of moral values, playing both a facilitating and constraining role in moral life.