Social Construction Of Mental Illness
The social construction of mental illness
Key Words * Career: The gradual change in people as a response to a label e.g. mental patient. * Learned Helplessness: learning how to be dependent. * Life-course model: suggests that the accumulation of social events experienced over a whole lifetime, not just individual important events, influence people and their mental state. * Presenting culture: a term used by Goffman to refer to how people like to portray themselves to others. * Schizophrenia: a form of mental illness where people are unable to distinguish their own feelings and perceptions from reality. * Self-Fulfilling prophecy: predictions about the behaviour of social groups that come true as a result of positive …show more content…
It may explain the responses of others to the mentally ill, but cannot explain the causes of the illness.
Foucault’s perspective on mental illness: * He explains the growth in the concept of mental illness by placing it in the context if the changing ways of thinking and acting which developed in the early 18th century. * During the enlightenment more traditional ways of thinking were gradually replaced by more rational and disciplined ways of thinking. He argues that as rationality developed into the normal way of thinking, irrationality became to be perceived as deviant. * Having mad people in asylums isolated mad people away from the majority of the population. They symbolized the fact that madness or irrationality was marked out as behaviour that is no longer acceptable.
Structuralist perspectives on mental illness: * Virde (1977) explained the fact that some ethnic minorities are more likely to develop mental health problems by arguing that the sorts of pressures and stresses that can cause people to develop mental illness are more often experienced by people in an ethnic …show more content…
Social capital (Putnam 2000) argued that people who have extensive and strong levels of social networks are more likely to be ‘happier’ than those who don’t.
Check Your Understanding: 1) The two sociological approaches to explaining mental illness are social realist and social constructionist. 2) Social realist bases itself on the idea that there are distinctive sets of abnormal behaviour that should be treated; they are very similar to the bio-medical approach. Social constructionist believes that definitions of mental illness can vary over time and in different cultures. 3) Labelling helps us understand that some people may live up to the label they have been given and can strip mental health patients of any self-dignity as they have no say in what happens to them as they have been given the label of someone who is mad. 4) A structural explanation is closely tied to the social realist definition of mental illness; they accept the reality of mental illness and set out to discover what social factors help cause
Key Words * Career: The gradual change in people as a response to a label e.g. mental patient. * Learned Helplessness: learning how to be dependent. * Life-course model: suggests that the accumulation of social events experienced over a whole lifetime, not just individual important events, influence people and their mental state. * Presenting culture: a term used by Goffman to refer to how people like to portray themselves to others. * Schizophrenia: a form of mental illness where people are unable to distinguish their own feelings and perceptions from reality. * Self-Fulfilling prophecy: predictions about the behaviour of social groups that come true as a result of positive …show more content…
It may explain the responses of others to the mentally ill, but cannot explain the causes of the illness.
Foucault’s perspective on mental illness: * He explains the growth in the concept of mental illness by placing it in the context if the changing ways of thinking and acting which developed in the early 18th century. * During the enlightenment more traditional ways of thinking were gradually replaced by more rational and disciplined ways of thinking. He argues that as rationality developed into the normal way of thinking, irrationality became to be perceived as deviant. * Having mad people in asylums isolated mad people away from the majority of the population. They symbolized the fact that madness or irrationality was marked out as behaviour that is no longer acceptable.
Structuralist perspectives on mental illness: * Virde (1977) explained the fact that some ethnic minorities are more likely to develop mental health problems by arguing that the sorts of pressures and stresses that can cause people to develop mental illness are more often experienced by people in an ethnic …show more content…
Social capital (Putnam 2000) argued that people who have extensive and strong levels of social networks are more likely to be ‘happier’ than those who don’t.
Check Your Understanding: 1) The two sociological approaches to explaining mental illness are social realist and social constructionist. 2) Social realist bases itself on the idea that there are distinctive sets of abnormal behaviour that should be treated; they are very similar to the bio-medical approach. Social constructionist believes that definitions of mental illness can vary over time and in different cultures. 3) Labelling helps us understand that some people may live up to the label they have been given and can strip mental health patients of any self-dignity as they have no say in what happens to them as they have been given the label of someone who is mad. 4) A structural explanation is closely tied to the social realist definition of mental illness; they accept the reality of mental illness and set out to discover what social factors help cause