Structural explanations for mental illness

Mental illness is real but they look at how is it unequally distributed among different social groups and why this might be. 

• Class
• Age
• Gender
• Ethnicity

• The working class are more likely to suffer from mental illnesses.
• This is because of the stress of finanical worries.
• Myers - especially mothers because of poverty(material deprovisation) and increased family stresses.
• Brown and Harris - studied depression amongst London women and found that 'working class women are more likely to suffer stressful life events than the middle class because they have fewer material resources.

• Older people are more likely to be labelled as mentally ill. 
• Care homes are institutional and carers engage in spurious interaction
• Older people have to rely on others and lose hope, which confirms mental illness label.

• Women are more likely to experience mental health problems.
• Feminists blame this on the triple shift(housework,childcare and emotional work)Duncombe and Marsden but women seek help and men don't.
• Brown - women have stressful lives
• Busfield - 'pressure' and responsibility.
• Chester - more likely to be labelled, more medicalisation of conditions through drugs.

• African-carribeans suffer high levels of mental illness and are more likely to be diagnosed as schizophrenic.
• Nazroo - Suffer more depression but sees this as caused by racism and educational underachievement and/or negative labelling by doctors and psychiatrists.
• Littlewood and Lipsedge - found that black people are overrepresented in psychiatirc hospitals not because they are more ill but because psychiatrists impose their own idea of normality of black behaviour.