A sociology of mental health and illness

Content: A Sociology of Mental Health and Illness
 A Sociology of Mental Health and Illness
 Praise for this book
 Contents
 Preface to the fifth edition
 1 Perspectives on mental health and illness
 Clinical perspectives on mental health and illness
 Psychiatry
 Psychoanalysis
 Psychology
 The statistical notion
 The presence of specific behaviours
 Distorted cognitions
 Discussion of the clinical perspectives
 Perspectives within sociology
 An outline of four sociological perspectives
 Social causation
 Hermeneutics
 Social constructivism
 Social realism. Discussion of the clinical and sociological perspectivesDiscussion
 2 Social stratification and mental health
 The general relationship between social class and health status
 The life-course perspective on social class and mental health
 The relationship between social class and diagnosed mental illness
 Social capital and mental health
 The relationship between poverty and mental health status
 Labour market disadvantage and mental health
 Housing and mental health
 Social class and mental health professionalism
 Lay views about mental health and social class
 Discussion. 3 Gender, sexuality and mental healthThe over-representation of women in psychiatric diagnosis
 Does society cause excessive female mental illness?
 Vulnerability factors
 Provoking agents
 Symptom-formation factors
 Is female over-representation a measurement artefact?
 Gendered differences in help-seeking behaviour
 Are women labelled as mentally ill more often than men?
 The effects of labelling secondary deviance --
women and minor tranquillizers
 Men, distress dangerousness and mental health services
 Masculinity meets femininity
 Gender and sexuality
 Discussion
 4 Race and ethnicity. Theoretical presuppositions and approaches to race and ethnicityRace and health
 The epidemiology of mental health, race and ethnicity
 Methodological cautions about findings
 Type of service contact
 Disproportionate coercion
 Black people's conduct and attributions of madness --
some summary points
 Labelling merely reflects actual incidence of mental disorder
 Misdiagnosis
 Racialized psychiatric constructs reflect and reinforce wider racism
 South Asian women and the somatization thesis
 Migration and mental health
 Discussion
 5 Age, ageing and mental health over the life course. Age and the life courseChildhood and mental health
 Sociology, childhood and adversity
 Childhood sexual abuse and mental health problems
 Social competence in adulthood
 Adolescence, social media and mental health
 The 'Third Age', retirement and mental health
 The Third Age, and focus on dementia and depression in older people
 Discussion
 6 The organization of mental health work
 The rise of the asylum and its legacy
 The crisis of the asylum
 Responses to the crisis
 The 'pharmacological revolution'
 'Economic determinism'