Mental illness and suicide: the sociology of deviance

Question 1

Suicide

Answer 1

• Durkheim: used official statistics and claimed to have discovered the causes of suicide in how effectively society integrated individuals and regulated their behaviour

Question 2

Douglas: the meaning of suicide

Answer 2

• Interactionist approach
• Critical of using official suicide statistics as they are socially constructed and tells us about the activities of those who created them
• Whether a death is marked as a suicide or as a homocide depends on the interactions between social actors such as the coroner, relatives, friends…

Question 3

Atkinson: coroners’ commonsense knowledge

Answer 3

• Official stats are merely a record of the labels coroners attach to deaths
• ‘Typical suicide’: certain modes of the death, and life history

Question 4

Paranoia as a self-fulfilling prophecy

Answer 4

• Interactionists are interested in how a person comes to be labelled as mentally ill, and the effects of this label
• ‘Mental patient’ becomes his master status
• Rosenhan’s pseudo-patient experiment

Question 5

Institutionalisation

Answer 5

• Goffman’s (1961) study of asylums shows the effects of being admitted to a ‘total institution’
• Process of ‘mortification of the self’ where their old identity is killed off and replaced with a new one
• Degradation rituals achieve this: ie confiscation of personal effects
• Some people adopt forms of resistance: Braginski et al’s study of long-term psychiatric patients

Question 6

Evaluation of the labelling theory:

Answer 6

1. Deterministic
2. Focuses on less serious crimes such as drug taking
3. Offenders are shown as passive
4. Fails to explain why people commit primary deviance in the first place