SOCI 1002H Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Gender Dysphoria, Substance Dependence, Pharmaceutical Industry
14 Jun 2018
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Lecture 4
Mental Illness: Distress and Disorder
What is a Sociological Study of Mental Illness?
1. Definitions of mental illness/health
• How do we think about mental illness?
• Definitions of mental disorders reflect social values of ‘normal’
• Culturally and historically
• Ex. gender dysphoria: a conflict between a person’s physical or
assigned gender and the gender with which he/she/they identify
2. Performance of mental illness as “identity”
• Social rules of mental illness: norms that govern how to be mentally ill
• Often fail to comply with role expectations due to stigma
• What are the rules for being mentally ill?
• How are we supposed to behave?
• Want help, accept help, try to be healthy, know we need to
change
• Achieved/ascribed status
3. Social causes of mental illness
• High stress environments of poverty, unemployment, violence, unstable housing
• Social disorganization results in higher rates of depression and
schizophrenia
• Poverty creates isolation from normal social contacts- seclusive
personality
• Or schizophrenic behaviour leads to social isolation and spiralling
of symptoms
4. Governance of mental illness
• Criminalization and Victimization
• Police tasering: Sammy Yatim
• Street violence: homeless shelters
• Prisoner populations:
• 30% of male offenders self-report chronic mental illness; 65% female
offenders
• Life course histories of psychiatric hospitalization, homelessness, and
incarceration
• Deaths in custody
• Lack of access to medications
• Security not treatment
• Segregation as treatment
Stigma: discrimination and ostracism
• Institutional racism: hostility and mistrust symptomatic of illness not mistreatment
Unemployment: 70-90%
• Employer practices: high stress work places; low income jobs: no benefits or sick days
Stigma, social isolation to lack of treatment affordability and access to subculture belonging to
victimization to addiction, criminal involvement, violence to criminalization, police and prison
What happens when you are labelled mentally ill?
• Pharmaceutical industry as primary site of treatment and control:
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