Health for everyone. Not just the absence of illness but a state of complete well-being. The mandate of the World Health Organization and its famous definition, in the age of medicalization and the quantification of health and illness, in the age of the dictatorship of hygiene.

A new way of registering the subject in the social bond: the deviation from the ideal body, the deviation from the ideal of mental health, the deviation from the generally ideal way of life and hygiene, the new form of discomfort in culture.

But what about the sufferer himself, the patient, the subject who 'is ill' in this externally directed universe in relation to the determination of his own normality, in the universe of specialists, measurement, statistics, and ethics committees? The new symptoms of culture and their registration in the social bond, in this new context of health and illness, from the perspective of psychoanalysis and the broader social sciences, constitute the subject of this work.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]