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The Sociological Study of Mental Illness: A Historical Perspective (2016)

Mental illness, as the eminent historian of psychiatry Michael MacDonald once aptly remarked, “is the most solitary of afflictions to the people who experience it; but it is the most social of maladies to those who observe its effects.” It is precisely the many social and cultural dimensions of mental illness, of course, that have made the subject of such compelling interest to sociologists. How, for example, are we to define and draw boundaries around mental illness, and to distinguish it from eccentricity or mere idiosyncrasy, to draw the line between madness and malingering, mental disturbance and religious inspiration? Who has social warrant to make such decisions, and why?

Sociology as a discipline began to coalesce in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, in Britain, in Germany, and the United States, at first often outside university settings, as in the British social survey tradition pioneered by Charles Booth (1889, 1891, 1892-1897) and Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree (1901), but soon enough within the walls of academic institutions. Psychiatrists are ridiculed as members of a “tinkering trade” who induce their subordinates to stage elaborate rituals designed to show that they preside over a medical establishment devoted to humane care and cure, when in reality, they are little better than prison guards helping to generate the very pathologies they claim to treat. Others sought alternative explanations of the shift in social policy, and a series of studies began to suggest some of the defects of the new approach to the management of chronic mental illness (Kirk and Thierren 1975; Aviram, Syme and Cohen 1976; Windle and Scully 1976; Scull 1977, 1984; Rose 1979; Gronfein 1985b).

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