25

This article explores the use of long-acting antipsychotics (LANAs) in French psychiatry from 1966 to the present day, bringing together three complementary ambitions. From a historical point of view, it traces the dynamics of the appropriation of LANAs, showing how their diffusion accompanied, without determining, the institutional transformations of psychiatry, notably through sectorization. On a socio-anthropological level, the analysis of practices, based on ethnographic data, interviews, and medical archives, reveals the varied uses of LANAs, between therapeutic negotiation, management of “compliant” patients, and redefinition of care settings outside the hospital. Finally, the article’s theoretical ambition is to examine the complex relationship between pharmacological innovation and institutional transformations. Far from being technologically determined, LANAs appear to be “tracers” of psychiatric changes, whose meanings evolve according to context.