Topic 7 - Sociology of Mental Illness

Question 1

What kind of stress affects mental health?

Answer 1

chronic

Question 2

Men have higher rates of what mental disorders?

Answer 2

schizophrenia, substance abuse, and impluse control disorders

Question 3

Women have higher rates of what mental disorders?

Answer 3

anxiety disorders and mood disorders

Question 4

Explain the social stress theory

Answer 4

lower-class persons have higher rates of mental illness because of the stresses of lower-class life

Question 5

Behavior leads to the label of mental illness when it violates what three norms?

Answer 5

cognitive norms, performance norms, and feeling norms

Question 6

What is the effect of sex-role socialization?

Answer 6

• men socialized to responde to their problems with violence
• women may learn to respond with feelings of helplessness

Question 7

Explain the social drift theory.

Answer 7

mental illness causes individuals to drift into lower social class (weaker support) what is the causation?

Question 8

Explain Erving Goffman’s book Asylums.

Answer 8

• mental hospitals are total institutions
• depersonalized their inmates
• worsened patients’ mental health

Question 9

Explain the antipsychiatry critique developed by Goffman.

Answer 9

• mental hospitals as total institutions
• self-fufilling prophecy
• mortification
• role of patient becomes a master status
• depersonalization

Question 10

List the casuses of deninstitutionalization

Answer 10

• changes in health care financing and insurance reimbursement
• rise of individualism
• not simply due to new medications and improved treatment

Question 11

What were almshouses?

Answer 11

poorhouses that housed poor people, people with disabilities, and criminals

Question 12

Explain the period of the Great Confinement.

Answer 12

• The process of placing individuals who were mentally ill in their own institutions instead of the almshouses that housed everyone
• Created after moral treatment failed

Question 13

Explain mortification coined by Goffman.

Answer 13

• individuals’ sense of self was damaged and replaced by personalities adapted to institutional life

Question 14

How was mental illness remedicalized?

Answer 14

• developed new techniques for diagnosis and treatment
• more RX drugs
• developing new theories that connect mental illness to biological causes

Question 15

Describe what self-labeling may entail?

Answer 15

• feeling work: actively working to make their emotions match social expectations
• aligning actions and snowballing