9.1 Chapter Overview
I am grateful to my friend David who has taught me a new way to live with a severe mental illness. — Kate Burrows
Figure 9.1 Rosalind’s Story: Living with Serious Mental Illness and Alcoholism [YouTube Video]. Please watch this 5:58 minute video. As you watch, please consider how mental illness might complicate other social problems?
In this chapter, we examine the social problem of mental health, mental illness and mental well-being. 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 day or a tough week, and mental illness? To begin, we’ll read my story about my interactions in a mental hospital.
9.1.1 Kate’s Story
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I have a SPMI (severe and persistent mental illness), and needed to be hospitalized because I couldn’t differentiate between reality and fantasy. This excerpt tells part of my story. Many people* appear in the excerpt:
(*All of the names are changed to protect the anonymity of the people.) Personal Experiences of Stigma and Out-grouping in the Psychiatric Hospital Encounter 1: “Do you believe in UFOs?” From my diary: Monday Day 1, South Unit Holland and I were standing in line for dinner, and we started talking about our delusions. They are almost exactly the same! We got so excited, because finally, for once, we were talking to somebody who believed us, and who understood! Holland GETS me. He knows about the things that come over the radio. I know about the signs he gets from church. I am so excited to meet somebody who is like me! Lise was overhearing us, and said, “What do you mean?” Holland explained that there were things going on in the universe that she doesn’t know about, and only special people can know about them. Then Christian broke in and said, “How do you know about this?” I told him I heard it on the radio. Then Jim said, in a totally rude and demeaning voice, “Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe in UFOs? You can’t believe everything you hear on the radio!” First of all, Jim thought I was talking about FM radio, but you can’t hear anything over FM. I get the messages from Andy’s ham radio at home. I felt like they were calling me crazy—calling me nuts. Like Lise has been sober for three days, and those other guys are all depressed and Bipolar. Like they have something over us. Encounter 2: “I can’t believe he’s schizo!” From my diary: Monday Day 2, South Unit Today while I was waiting for our music group to start, Lise and Liz were talking about a conversation they had with Music last night. Lise said, “He was like a normal person! It was amazing!” Liz added, “I can’t believe he’s schizo! I mean, he talked to me totally normally. Do you know he has been married twice and has kids?” “You’d never know he had schizophrenia,” Lise said. “Until he forgets his name!” Liz said, and then they both laughed. I didn’t know what to do to stand up for Music. I should have. I feel guilty for just letting them sit there and talk about him like that, but I didn’t know what to do. They’ve obviously never met a person with schizophrenia before. They acted like he was a freak. It was horrible. In this story, you might notice all the things you have in common with the people who are patients. In the hospital we had to figure out how to talk to people and how to get along. Just like high school, we formed our own groups. Some people were the in-crowd, and others weren’t. In this chapter, we use the models of social problems and social location that we have been using all along. And, we add some new sociological approaches—stigma, total institutions and in-group out group theory to understand why “who feels OK?” is a sociological issue. |
You may have experienced your own challenge with mental health during COVID-19. Many of us are feeling stressed, lonely or depressed. We may have even needed to see a counselor for the first time, or we may have found that the ways we usually cope with life didn’t work. But why would we consider this a social problem?
At first blush, mental health appears to be a uniquely personal phenomenon: mental health, mental well-being and mental illness seem to be intensely private experiences outside of the realm of sociological analysis. After all, who but psychologists and psychiatrists are truly equipped to understand mental health and illness? In this chapter, our aim is to not only 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 chapter 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 its social origins and to the institutions of social control involved in mental illness.
The goal of this chapter is to critically examine how history, institutions, and culture shape our conceptions of mental illness and people with mental health challenges. Mental health and mental illness become a social problem because of the conflict in how people disagree about these ideas. We will consider the variety of social factors that contribute to the rates and the experiences of mental illness. By this point in our exploration, you will not find it surprising to discover that social location impacts the social problem of “who is OK?”
9.1.2 Focusing Questions
In this chapter, we examine the epidemiology of mental health and mental illness to discover how race, class gender and other social locations impact how people are diagnosed and treated. 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. The questions that focus our curiosity are:
- What is the difference between mental health, mental illness, and mental well-being?
- Which social factors might impact how a person might get diagnosed and treated for mental illness?
- How does the social construction of mental health and mental illness create a social problem?
- How is mental health and mental illness an underlying factor in other social problems?
- Why do people experience different mental health diagnosis based on gender, race, class, incarceration status and other social locations?
- How has COVID-19 both increased the incidents of mental health issues and improved our capacity for providing mental health support?
9.1.3 Licenses and Attributions for Chapter Overview
“Chapter Overview” by Kate Burrows is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
“Kate’s Story” by Kate Burrows is all rights reserved, © 2022.