Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Sociologists who study mental disorder work from a number of assumptions that define and distinguish their approach from other ways of understanding mental disorder. First, sociologists may view mental disorder as a normal consequence of social life caused by structured inequality rather than as a form of individual dysfunction. Second, they may regard mental disorder as the outcome of social processes that include the labeling of deviant behavior and stigmatic societal reactions to those labels. Third, they may define the object of study as psychological distress rather than as specific psychiatric disorders. Fourth, they may view the mental health treatment system as an institution for the social control of deviant behavior. Finally, the sociological perspective is concerned with properties of groups and populations and it is less informative regarding individual and clinical concerns. Although not all sociologists employ all of these assumptions in their research and some of these assumptions have generated considerable debate, collectively they represent what is distinctive about the sociological study of mental disorder. The psychiatric medical model accounts for mental disorder as a function of individual biological reactions to environmental (including social) hazard and/or individual biochemical or genetic dysfunction – the broken brain. Biological psychiatry now dominates ... log in or subscribe to read full text