Over the last 40 years, mental illness and psychiatry have undergone considerable changes. The former is now largely subsumed by the value attached to mental health. The latter has been significantly reorganized due to the success of the neurosciences and pharmacology and to the new “community health” policy. Despite significant variations from one country to another, most Western societies have been affected by these developments. This is due to the facts that they have taken place under the auspices of the World Health Organization, that the scientific and industrial evolutions concerned impact all of these countries, and that a national (American) nosography ”the DSM”has been widely adopted in almost all of them. Another social and sociological issue relates to the development of certain mental illnesses that sometimes appear to have reached epidemic proportions. How has French-language sociological research dealt with such developments? A rapid overview reveals a number of dominant themes: the organization of mental health care; the social representations of mental health and illness; the relationship between mental health, the criminal justice system, and crime; the production of epidemiological data; the analysis of mental illness diagnosis; and the relationship between mental illness and social context. Rather than presenting an exhaustive analysis of the research conducted on one of these themes, this paper paints an overall picture of this research field, paying particular attention to the debates and questions it has raised.