Mental illness and suicide

Durkheim 1897 — suicide

• Studied with official stats

Interactionists and suicide

• Must study its meaning to those who commit it

Douglas 1967 and Atkinson 1978 — process of labelling of suicide

• Suicide + familial denial and/or religious coroner → death by misadventure

Douglas 1967 — study of suicide

• Interactionist approach that criticises official stats (tell us more about those who construct them than the real rate of crime/suicide

Douglas — labelling of suicide

• Death → its label of suicide is a result of interactions between social actors

Douglas — 2 factors that may prevent something being labelled as a suicide

1. Relative’s guilt about preventing the death

2. V. religious coroner that sees suicide as sin

Douglas — 3 examples of qualitative methods that better tell us about suicide

1. Analysis of suicide notes

2. Unstructured interviews with deceased’s friends and relatives

3. Unstructured interviews with survivors of suicide attempt(s)

Atkinson 1978 (ethnomethodologist) — 3 things that make up a typical suicide

1. Life history, e.g. recent bereavement

2. Location of death

3. Mode of death, e.g. hanging or 10+ sleeping pills

CRITICISM of Atkinson

• Says that official stats are just an interpretation of death, but so is his judgment of a typical suicide

Mental illness — interactionists

• Official stats only a record of the activities of those with the power to label others (psychiatrists)

Lemert 1962 — paranoia as a s-f p

• Individuals don’t fit into groups (primary deviance) → labelled as odd → excluded → their response is the start of their secondary deviance → give others more reason to exclude them → others discuss how to deal with the individual → gives individual more reason to believe people are conspiring about them → confirms other’s fears for individual’s MH → individual labelled as paranoid and put in an institution (master status)

Rosenhan 1973 — on being sane in insane places

• Researchers claimed to hear voices and self-admitted to hospital

• Diagnosed as schizophrenic

  • Became master status

    • Treated differently by staff

Goffman 1961 — institutionalisation

• Total institutions = asylums, army, boarding school

  • ‘Mortification of the self’ → old ID replaced by ‘inmate’ via degradation rituals like confiscation of personal items

• Some individuals become institutionalised, others resist

Braginski et al 1969

• Long-term psychiatric patients manipulate symptoms to appear sick enough to stay but not well enough to leave

  • But can achieve goal, e.g. free mvmt around hospital