mental illness / suicide

douglas

• argues that we must discover meanings of suicide

• reject official suicide statistics - social constructs

• must use qualitative methods e.g. suicide notes, unstructured interviews

atkinson

• coroners use taken for granted assumptions to construct social reality

• ideas about a typical suicide affected their verdict e.g. mode of death, circumstance

mental illness

• paranoia as a self fulfilling prophecy

• lemert - socially awkward - excluded

• negative response = reason to fear for mental health

institutionalisation

• goffman - effects of being admitted to a total institution

• mortification of self - old identity is killed and replaced by a new one ‘inmate’ - this is done by degradation rituals

evaluation

• too deterministic

• ignores victims of crime