Our human lives contain sadness, loss, excitement, joy, and, especially in the
Our human lives contain sadness, loss, excitement, joy, and, especially in the United States, feeling like you are not enough. But what are the boundaries between having a tough week and mental illness? To begin, we’ll read my story about my interactions in a mental hospital.
After all, who but psychologists and psychiatrists are truly equipped to understand mental health and illness? In this chapter, we aim not only to understand the role of sociology in the study of mental health but to gain a deeper understanding of the effects of social life on our mental well-being. You will be introduced to the major concepts and techniques of understanding mental health and illness from a sociological perspective.
This topic is interdisciplinary. It includes material from many fields. But there is a coherent organizing theme: the need to understand mental illness in a broad social context. Too often, scientists and psychologists study people who have diseases of the mind without regard to their social origins and the institutions of social control involved in mental illness. Mental health and mental illness become a social problem because of the conflict in how people disagree about these ideas. We will consider the social factors contributing to the rates and the experiences of mental illness. By this point in our exploration, you will not find it surprising that social location impacts the social problem of “Who is OK?”
We explore how sociologists explain this difference, using concepts such as stigma. Finally, we consider the interdependent nature of mental health and mental illness. These conditions impact individuals, but they also affect families and society.
- How can we understand mental health as a social problem?
- Why do people experience different mental health issues, diagnoses, and treatments based on gender, race, class, and other social locations?
- How does the social construction of the mixed-race identity explain social inequality, particularly in relation to mental health?
- How are mental health and mental illness underlying factors in other social problems?
- How does the structural oppression of patriarchy impact social problems, particularly related to women, queer, transgender, and non-binary people?
- How do sociological explanations of mental health and mental illness differ from primarily medical or psychological models?
- What creative solutions to providing mental health services combine individual agency and collective action to expand social justice?
In our everyday lives, we might say someone is crazy. Or we might say that we feel out of it. These terms are commonly used, but social scientists must be more precise in their language. Once we have defined our terms, we explore why mental health and mental illness are social problems, not just individual ones.
Mental health is a state of mind characterized by emotional well-being, good behavioral adjustment, relative freedom from anxiety and disabling symptoms, and a capa