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
1 of 5
Class
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.
2 of 5
Age
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.
3 of 5
Gender
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.
4 of 5
Ethnicity
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.
Comments
No comments have yet been made