Social constructionism has been very influential in the sociological conception of mental illness. It is based on the argument that what is considered "normal" or "mentally ill" behaviour varies over time and from society to society.
Is mental health a social construct?
He argues that many mental health conditions are as much a social construct as medical diagnosis, with doctors or therapists and their patients creating them together. “There are certainly serious conditions, like schizophrenia and manic depression, that are not a social construction,” says Borch-Jacobsen.
Why is the sociological model important in mental health?
The social or sociological model is important in mental health because it explores the role of external environmental and social factors in mental health and illness. Is mental health a social issue? Mental health is a social issue because it is shaped by social factors and affects various social groups differently.
What is the social construction of Health and illness?
The social construction of health and illness refers to the ways our social world shapes the assessment, treatment, and collective understanding of various diseases and health conditions.
What is the sociology of mental health and illness?
The sociology of mental health and illness encompasses a number of ideas: The different approaches to mental illness, including the sociological and conventional models The distribution of mental illness by social groupings such as class, gender, and ethnicity What is the social model of mental health?
Is mental illness a social construction?
He argues that many mental health conditions are as much a social construct as medical diagnosis, with doctors or therapists and their patients creating them together. “There are certainly serious conditions, like schizophrenia and manic depression, that are not a social construction,” says Borch-Jacobsen.
What does it mean to say mental illness is socially constructed?
that mental illnesses are social constructs that have formed through cultural and historical. conversations between groups of individuals and not solely from a deficit within the individual.
How is illness a social construction?
In social constructionist theory, impairment refers to a physical illness or injury; disability is the social experience of impairment. Illness can reshape an individual's identity. For example, deafness can be a cultural identity that supplants individual identity.
How can health be viewed as a social construct?
Health as a social construct examines how an individuals context impacts upon their health status. It recognises the interrelationship of the determinants of health and notes that many of the determinants are either out of the individual's control, or made difficult to change because of their context.
What is the meaning of social construction?
Briefly, social construction (SC) assumes that people construct (i.e., create, make, invent) their understandings of the world and the meanings they give to encounters with others, or various products they or others create; SC also assumes that they do this jointly, in coordination with others, rather than individually ...
Is depression socially constructed?
Depression is both biologically and socially constructed. o There is a significant impact of the social environment on a person's state of being. a long period of time. social relationships. depressed, and having depression, as they have different uses and needs.
What does it mean to say that illness is a social construction and a moral status?
Illness results from a combination of social and biological causes. Moral Status: Is a social condition that we believe indicates the goodness or badness, worthiness or unworthiness, of a person. From a sociological perspective, illness is not only a moral status but also a form of deviance. Deviance.
Is diagnosis a social construct?
The social construction of diagnosis and illness is a central organizing theme in medical sociology. By studying how illness is socially constructed, we examine how social forces shape our understanding of and actions toward health, illness, and healing.
What factors play significant roles in terms of constructing the illness experience?
In terms of constructing the illness experience, culture and individual personality both play a significant role. For some people, a long-term illness can have the effect of making their world smaller, leading to a life that is more defined by the illness than by anything else.
How could the social construction of illness help us understand hypochondria?
Hypochondria: health anxiety, is worrying excessively that you are or may become seriously ill (Mayo Clinic). For people who suffer from health anxiety, the social construction of illness offers a diagnosis, different perspective/outlook, another answer to symptoms, a second opinion, etc.
How are things socially constructed?
Social construct theory says that humans create constructs in order to make sense of the objective world. One way humans create social constructs is by structuring what they see and experience into categories.
Is the DSM biologically or socially constructed?
socially constructedHowever, rather than being treated as the Bible of psychiatric illness, it is important that the DSM be seen in its proper context, as a socially constructed document that has far reaching implications for our clients and our profession.
Is the DSM socially constructed?
Abstract. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorder (5th Ed. or DSM-5) represents a foundational text within the psychiatric and mental health field, a document that is historically and socially positioned within the field as the global standard for diagnostic health information.
Is anxiety socially constructed?
Nonetheless, a larger body of evidence suggests that the prevalence of anxiety is due less to these pressures themselves than to a prevailing social ethos that teaches people that anxiety-related symptoms are a socially and medically legitimate response to life in the modern age.
Is mental health a social phenomenon?
We can define the concept of mental health not just as a health phenomenon, but also as a social and psychological one.
What is the social construction of mental illness?
Mental illness as a social construct is a branch of social constructivism which builds on the belief that knowledge and meaning are socially constr...
Which sociologist devised the sick role?
Talcott Parsons
Which of the following is NOT one of Joan Busfield's three categories for mental health disorders?
Disorders of sexuality
How did Comte's philosophy that 'truth only came from scientific knowledge' apply to mental health and illness?
When this philosophy was applied to mental health and illness, there was a belief that humans could be diagnosed and fixed with medication, in a si...
Who argues that all illnesses are socially constructed?
Conrad and Barker (2010)
What is a mental illness or mental disorder?
According to psychiatry.org, mental illnesses "are health conditions involving changes in emotion, thinking or behaviour (or a combination of these)."
What is mental illness?
Busfield (2002) classifies mental illness as: Disorders of thought , e.g. psychosis, schizophrenia, sociopathy Disorders of emotion , e.g. depres...
What does Foucault say regarding mental illness?
According to Foucault, the modern concept of mental illness came about as a result of the process of rationalisation during and after the Enlig...
Why does Scheff consider mental illness a "label"?
Scheff believes that the label "mental illness" was conceived to explain away behaviour that people find bizarre or socially unacceptable .
Describe Szasz's views on psychiatry.
Szasz states that the role of modern psychiatry is to control deviant behaviour that the powerful do not like.
What is the biomedical approach?
The biomedical approach sees mental illness as being situated in the biological body and advocates for scientific diagnosis and medical trea...
Define interactionism.
Interactionism or labelling theory is concerned with understanding human behaviour in face-to-face situations and how individuals and situati...
What were Goffman's findings on mental illness?
Goffman's (1968) research found that once they are institutionalised , people with mental health conditions are stripped of all individuality a...
What is the structuralist approach to mental health?
The structuralist approach asserts that mental health conditions are not (purely) biological and that the structure of society and cultural an...
What does Laing think of the biomedical approach?
He rejects it, espousing societal factors such as the family as the main causes of mental illness
What is social constructionism?
Social constructionism holds that individuals and groups produce their own conceptions of reality, and that knowledge itself is the product of social dynamics. There is a distinction between the medical notion of disease and the social constructionist concept of illness.
How does illness affect identity?
Illness can reshape an individual’s identity. For example, deafness can be a cultural identity that supplants individual identity. Medicalization—the act of reducing illness to strictly a medical definition—ignores the social context of disease.
What is the sociological study of mental illness?
The Sociological Study of Mental Illness: A Historical Perspective. Mental illness, as the eminent historian of psychiatry Michael MacDonald once aptly remarked, “is the most solitary of afflictions to the people who experience it; but it is the most social of maladies to those who observe its effects” (MacDonald 1981: 1).
Which school of sociology dealt with mental illness only tangentially?
If Durkheim and the Durkheimian school dealt with mental illness only tangentially, another major school of sociological thought that was emerging in the early twentieth century, the Chicago School led by Park and Burgess frequently tackled the subject more directly.
What are the social pathologies of psychosis?
Psychoses were only one of a number of what they termed social pathologies that fell under their gaze – alongside homelessness, alcoholism, suicide, homicide, prostitution, juvenile delinquency, and crime . Characteristically, the psychological disorganization that characterizes mental illness (and other forms of deviance) was linked to the social disorganization of particular communities – the prevalence of anonymous and transitory social relationships and the weakness of social ties, all associated with the breakdown of social controls. (For discussions of the Chicago School, see Bulmer 1984; Faris 1967.)
How did the Second World War affect mental health?
Modern industrialized and mechanized warfare has repeatedly had drastic effects on the mental health of military personnel, and the Second World War, like the first, saw a massive number of psychiatric casualties spawned by the horrors of combat. Many of these were permanently harmed, so that the military authorities faced the immediate emergency of coping with soldiers breaking down – the effects on fighting efficiency and morale – and the post-war problems posed by disabled veterans with grave and continuing psychiatric problems. The exigencies of wartime prompted a massive expansion in the number of medics deployed to deal with psychiatric emergencies, and a continuing expanded demand for psychiatrists after the war ended. The knowledge that, under enormous stress, even the apparently psychiatrically healthy broke down in large numbers, and the heroic status of these psychiatric casualties, also helped change popular attitudes to mental illness, and encouraged the psychiatric profession to believe that many cases of mental illness could be treated outside the walls of the mental hospitals to which the mentally ill had been traditionally sent (Scull 2010).
Why are psychiatrists ridiculed?
Psychiatrists are ridiculed as members of a “tinkering trade” who induce their subordinates to stage elaborate rituals designed to show that they preside over a medical establishment devoted to humane care and cure, when in reality, they are little better than prison guards helping to generate the very pathologies they claim to treat. As he put it a decade later, mental hospitals were no more than “hopeless storage dumps trimmed in psychiatric paper.” As for the patient, he has been duped, suffering “dislocation from civil life, alienation from loved ones who arranged for the commitment, mortification due to hospital regimentation and surveillance, permanent post-hospital stigmatization. This has not merely been a bad deal; it has been a grotesque one” (Goffman 1971: 390).
What is Goffman's portrait of social interaction?
In contrast to the symbolic-interactionist emphasis on the fluidity of social interaction, Goffman’s is a portrait of structural determinism. Mental hospitals resemble prisons and concentration camps, as well as monasteries, nunneries, and boarding schools.
When did Faris and Dunham publish their monograph on mental health?
The culmination of this perspective on the sociological study of mental illness came with the publication in 1939 of Faris and Dunham’s monograph on Mental Disorders in Urban Areas, a volume which, its title notwithstanding, focused primarily on Chicago See Faris and Dunham 1939 ; and for an attempt to generalize their findings to other cities, Schroeder 1942). But in a broader sense, the fascination with deviance that the Chicago School exhibited, and the preoccupation of many of the sociologists it trained with ethnographic approaches to the study of social life can be traced in many of the works of post-war American sociology, not least many of the classic studies that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s devoted to the sociology of mental illness.
What are the two primary measures social scientists use to assess a country's overall health?
The two primary measurements social scientists use to assess a country's overall health are crime rates and infant mortality.
Do sick people need to have their lack of productivity justified?
According to Talcott Parsons, sick people do not need to have their lack of productivity justified.
Can medicalized conditions be better?
Those with medicalized conditions can better access medical treatment.
What is social constructionist mental health?
Social constructionists envisage symptoms as cultural definitions rather than as properties of individuals (Horwitz, 2002). From this viewpoint it is argued that the existence of mental illness depends on the particular culture in which a definition is being attempted. Anthropological work in non-Western cultures has shown that particular behaviours which would be viewed as symptomatic of a mental disorder by Western professionals are completely normal or nonexistent in these cultures (Perring, 2005). Further support for the social constructionist perspective is how every society has its own individual beliefs about what is normal/acceptable behaviour. For example; suicide in Catholic societies goes against the teachings of Christ and is intrinsically linked to poor mental health, whereas in old Japanese tradition, suicide was a way to atone for your sins and so was respected and honoured (Kawanishi, 2008 as cited in Luu, 2010). Kessler (n.d) states trends in mental health are almost impossible to establish because of the varied way in which mental health data is collected in different countries; data collected from Nigeria, for example, indicates a low rate of mental illness because Nigerians do not talk of mental health (as cited in Schmidt, 2007).
What is social constructionism?
Social Constructionism argues that something only exists because society built it, created it or needed it for its own development or interest (Boghossian, 2001). Szasz claims that “mental illness” was developed to control people that did not fit neatly into the current social system (as cited by Burchfield, 2008).
What does Szasz say about mental illness?
Factually speaking, Szasz argues “disease” implies “bodily disease” consequently; to speak of mental illness is to speak metaphorically, as the mind is not a literal part of the body (cited in Perring, 2005). He further argues the term mental illness has outlived its usefulness (Szasz, 1960) and now functions simply to “conceal scientific ...
What is the Somatogenic Hypothesis?
This idea that mental states and disorders are signs or symptoms of bodily processes is known as the Somatogenic hypothesis (Shontz, 1968). A number of mental illnesses demonstrate signs of biological causes or factors; for example, autistic people have been shown to have brain abnormalities.
What is the treatment for schizophrenia?
Antidepressants are used to alleviate the symptoms of depression, Anxiolytic drugs for the treatment of anxiety, and antipsychotic drugs which alleviate the symptoms of schizophrenia.
Why is Kessler's trend impossible to establish?
Kessler (n.d) states trends in mental health are almost impossible to establish because of the varied way in which mental health data is collected in different countries; data collected from Nigeria, for example, indicates a low rate of mental illness because Nigerians do not talk of mental health (as cited in Schmidt, 2007).
Who said the failure to define mental illness does not disprove its existence?
Although Ausubel (1961) was unable to successfully define mental illnesses and refute Szasz, Widiger and Trull (1986) stated that “The failure to define mental illness does not disprove its existence” (cited in Gorenstein, 1992, p5). Horwitz (2002) casts much doubt on the usefulness of our classification system.