Mental Illness

3 Pages 643 Words

“Mental illnesses are socially constructed and are highlighting aspects of those illnesses that help define how both the mentally ill and normal people behave” (Text, pg. 72). There are three different explanations of mental illness: 1) the medical model, 2) the deviance approach, 3) the controversial argument that mental illness is not a disease but a way that the government can control people with the said disease.
The medical model is a thought that holds a mental disorder to be viewed as a disease with biological causes (text, pg 72). Research on the medical model arose in reaction to the order that mentally ill people are “possessed” and should be locked up. The concept of mental disorder as a disease has certain disadvantages, because it concentrates on individuals and their immediate environment, it tends to disregard the wider social environment as a possible source of the problem. Especially for hospitalized patients, the medical model can lead to impractical criteria of recovery; people may have gained considerable insight into their inner tensions but are still unable to function correctly when they return to the outer tensions of home, job, or society (text, pg72).
The mental disorders that cause severe social problems are the most extreme forms of mental illness, in which individuals become violent and irrational. Less threatening, but more widespread as a social problem, are severely ill individuals who are unable to care for themselves without specialized attention (text).
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has gone a long way toward standardizing the diagnosis of mental illness. However, many researchers believe that psychiatric diagnoses are arbitrary and amount to labels, describing behavior that is contrary to accepted social and psychological norms (text).
Poverty is associated with high exposure to crime and violence, which creates stresse...