Social Construction Of Mental Illness Essay

Mental illnesses can be regarded as socially constructed because their definitions depend on who defines them and their relative position in the social structure, and because the definitions of mental illness vary across different social contexts and change over time. According to Mechanic (1967), members of an individual’s primary social group are likely the first ones to diagnose mental illness – thus, the first “diagnosis” of mental illness often comes from non-professionals. Furthermore, in order to be initially diagnosed, the individual needs to exhibit symptoms that are considered to be disturbing to the primary group. Subsequently, different social interactions and social groups lead to different perceptions of behavior and deviance
Once these pseudo-patients were placed into mental institutions, doctors and staff could not discern that these individuals were not actually mentally ill. Once thought to have a mental illness, the labeled mental illness became an individual’s master status, and subsequent everyday behaviors were labeled as symptoms of their alleged mental illness. Thus, doctors and nurses’ expectations of behavior changed when it came to these pseudo-patients. For example, the environment of the hospital led to several individuals’ boredom and desire to walk around, which nurses considered “pacing”. Furthermore, the act of writing field notes was seen as deviant in this context, whereas writing down notes in a journal would ordinarily not be considered deviant in most social contexts. Therefore, Rosenhan’s experiment showed that in the process of constructing definitions of mental illness, the symptoms themselves recede in importance, and the social setting creates new behaviors that can be labeled as symptoms. Ultimately, the social construction of mental illness teaches us that deviance should be seen as a process constantly in flux, and that neither deviance nor mental illness is solely based on an individual’s behavior or