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The sociology of mental health focuses on the epidemiology, etiology, correlates, and consequences of mental health (i.e., psychiatric disorder and symptoms, psychological distress, and subjective well-being) in an attempt to describe and explain how social structure influences an individual's psychological health. Critical race theory describes and explains iterative ways in which race is socially constructed across micro- and macro-levels, and how it determines life chances implicating the mundane and extraordinary in the continuance of racial stratification (i.e., racism). This paper invoked critical race theory to inform the sociology of mental health's approach to studying race and mental health by conceptualizing five hypothetical mental health problems that could exist because of racial stratification. These problems were: (1) nihilistic tendencies, (2) anti-self issues, (3) suppressed anger expression, (4) delusional denial tendencies, and (5) extreme racial paranoia. Mental health problems such as these and undocumented others can only be recognized given awareness of the social and personal implications of racial stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a commentary on the portrayal of the impact of the "Journal of Health and Social Behavior" (JHSB) by Robert J. Johnson and Frederic D. Wolinsky relative to other sociology and social sciences journals in the period of 1977 to 1987. It is agreed that the journal is in high standing and regard within the social science community. The major lessons cited by Johnson and Wolinsky are different from the thesis. It is confirmed that their analysis elucidates the dangers of relying much on impression and too little on factual investigation. Their data show little change in the proportion of stress articles over the 1990s period. The evidence presented does not sustain the general perception regarding the impact status of three other sociological journals relative to JHSB. The argument that the course of the impact of JHSB due to its identification with stress research is questioned based on the data presented. The data given is not organized efficiently to test the hypothesis.

When I began my psychiatric residency training in Boston in the late 1950s, sociologists and other social scientists were active members of many major academic departments of psychiatry. Collaboration between psychiatrists and sociologists and anthropologists was widespread and had considerable influence on theory and clinical practice. NIMH had established its Laboratory of Socio-Environmental Studies under the leadership of John Clausen. Sociologists and anthropologists were active in policy-making and research activities at NIMH and at many foundations. The influential works of Stanton and Schwartz (1954), Hollingshead and Redlich (1958), and Greenblatt, Levinson, and Williams (1957) reflect this period of collaboration. Over the subsequent three decades, the relationship between sociology and psychiatry changed considerably. Now relatively few academic departments of psychiatry have social scientists on their full-time faculty. Interaction between psychiatrists and social scientists, in many instances, has become adversarial. This adversarial quality, I believe, is reflected in the paper by Mirowsky and Ross. Their paper illustrates a genre of social science criticism of psychiatry which challenges the scientific validity of the concept of mental illness and raises important issues in measurement. Mirowsky and Ross, however, go beyond the scientific issues; they offer a social criticism of recent changes in psychiatry which they perceive to be the "legacy of nineteenth-century epidemiology and microbiology." Mirowsky and Ross are correct in their perception that significant shifts have occurred within psychiatry over the past decade. Yet their historical reconstruction of those changes and their understanding of the scientific basis for current research and clinical practice are seriously limited; they reflect their ideological commitment more than an appreciation of the increased sophistication of recent theoretical discourse and empirical research in psychiatry. In my commentary I will attempt to correct this imbalance by reconstructing the recent history and by explicating the rationale behind the current approach to psychiatric diagnostic categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues a number of points about measurement in the sociology of mental health: (1) measurement is critical, (2) measures should represent and assess elements of human experience, taking measure of life as people feel it, sense it, and understand it, and (3) social scientists should create a human science, producing information for the people it studies so that they can better understand and control their own lives. We argue that a human science is best achieved with the use of indexes, not diagnoses, to measure mental health. We present a brief history of diagnostic instruments and detail how a diagnosis is made. We show how use of diagnoses to measure mental health discounts much human suffering. They dichotomize the true range of feelings and emotions into crude either/or distinctions that do not reflect the reality of people's lives, and they often exclude suffering such as that due to loss or illness that does not meet medical model preconceptions about mental disorder. Using diagnoses to measure mental health presents a reified image of hidden disease knowable and manageable only by trained professionals--beyond the capacity of the suffering individuals to understand and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stress process paradigm is one of the most widely held perspectives in the sociology of mental health. While this model has been applied to a large number of research problems, relatively little work has examined whether the paradigm can assist in understanding the link between socially induced stressors and their consequences for the mental health of immigrants. In this paper, we employ a stress process formulation to examine the interplay among stressors, psychological and social resources, and psychological distress among a large sample of Korean immigrants living in Toronto, Canada. Data from a longitudinal study of over 600 respondents indicate that the stress process paradigm provides a useful perspective for understanding how chronic stressors associated with the immigration experience manifest themselves in psychological distress. Our results suggest that social and psychological resources have important deterrent effects on the experience of stressors and their subsequent distressful consequences. Ethnic social support and mastery are especially important factors in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a comment to the study by Robert J. Johnson and Frederic D. Wolinsky regarding their evaluation of the "Journal of Health and Social Behavior" relevant to the observations connected with the period from 1977 to 1987. Is is claimed that the decline of the the periodical's stature based on attempts to broaden its scope of journal coverage, reduction in subscription and changes in editorial policy. There is an implication that two committee reports caused a decline in citation which serves as the author's measure in stature. The frequency of citation of particular articles depends on many things including the content, quality of reported work, the author's reputation, the number of investigators and the visibility and reputation of a journal. It is argued that the change in the journal's image has lessened its visibility in the stress area and reduced the impact of some papers.

This paper provides a new way of conceptualizing the career of the mentally ill. Most persons who experience an episode of a serious mental disturbance lead a normal life, while a few persons lead lifetimes that revolve around their mental disorders. The processes leading to either result can only be understood by integrating the traditional labeling and psychiatric perspectives with lay understandings of the concepts of "mental illness" and "nervous breakdowns." A selection of key concepts from these perspectives leads to a better understanding of the different paths persons take as they move through the pre-patient, inpatient, and post-patient phases of the "career of the mentally ill." This perspective makes understandable a number of counterintuitive relationships. For example, it explains why most hospitalized mental patients (1) have a negative stereotype of the "mentally ill," (2) do not perceive themselves as "mentally ill, yet (3) perceive themselves as benefiting from treatment, and (4) do not progress into a career of secondary deviance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the piece by Robert J. Johnson and Frederic D. Wolinsky regarding the impact of the "Journal of Health and Social Behavior" publication on issues of identity, prestige and attribution. It is recognized that the magazine's status and stature is on the decline and that the fate of its contributing sociologists are affected. It is claimed that the article falls short within a broad patch of work known as the sociology of science. The author confines the observations to the fit between the Johnson and Wolinsky model and data presented, the identity of the periodical as a stress journal and the nature of scientific frontiers and the perspective nature of the article. The model and all its presented supporting arguments have been presented. The attempt to show the contrasting features of the periodical with another publication fails to place it in a focal publication status is stress research.

The Journal of Health and Social Behavior (JHSB) is examined to determine its relative stature and impact in the social science community. We conducted both empirical comparisons of average impact (based on the Social Science Citation Index) and content analysis. Over an 11-year period beginning in 1977, JHSB has maintained an enviable position among sociology journals, ranking significantly higher than the American Journal of Sociology and Social Forces. In addition, it ranks quite favorably when compared with the dominant journals of the allied social science disciplines. The preeminence of the JHSB is attributed to the legacy of stress research that was perceived to dominate this period. Ironically, the recently mandated change in editorial goals eschewing such an identification with stress research has begun to undermine the overall stature of the journal, primarily by reducing the impact of articles on stress that appear in it. We discuss the mechanisms that have influenced the course and the impact of this journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we question (1) whether the relationship between unemployment and mental healthcare use, controlling for mental health status, varies across European countries and (2) whether these differences are patterned by a combination of unemployment and healthcare generosity. We hypothesize that medicalization of unemployment is stronger in countries where a low level of unemployment generosity is combined with a high level of healthcare generosity. A subsample of 36,306 working-age respondents from rounds 64.4 (2005-2006) and 73.2 (2010) of the cross-national survey Eurobarometer was used. Country-specific logistic regression and multilevel analyses, controlling for public disability spending, changes in government spending, economic capacity, and unemployment rate, were performed. We find that unemployment is medicalized, at least to some degree, in the majority of the 24 nations surveyed. Moreover, the medicalization of unemployment varies substantially across countries, corresponding to the combination of the level of unemployment and of healthcare generosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the dual roles occupied by the sociologist of mental health. These roles involve the articulation of social causation in the study of mental health outside of the discipline, coupled with the articulation within the discipline of the importance of mental health in the study of sociology. I consider these roles both through examples and speculation, emphasizing the unique combination of conceptual and methodological tools that define the intellectual terrain of this area of sociology. The advantage of this dual role--of looking outward while also looking inward--is that we are able to draw from the essential developments and innovations from one source and "move" these insights toward the other. The difficulties of this position are also clear: As an area, we may be structurally marginal from both perspectives, at the same time that we offer considerable analytic power that could significantly impact the direction of research involving mental health in both realms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A wide body of literature documents the effect of social networks and social supports on mental health. Fewer studies, however, have examined the reciprocal effect of mental health on social relationships. This problem is examined using data from a national panel survey of adults aged 20-64. For the sample as a whole, support was found for a social selection process, since psychological distress predicted decreases in primary, but not secondary, social relationships. The extent of primary relationships also were found to be associated with subsequent distress, providing evidence that the relationship between mental health and social environment may be transactional. When examined separately by gender, males but not females were found to be vulnerable to the process of social selection, supporting the hypothesis that the expression of distress is less role-appropriate for men and therefore more likely to invite social sanctions. Social causation effects also were observed only among males. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assumptions and methods of previous studies of the social selection-drift hypothesis for serious mental illness are examined by using contemporary log-linear methods for social mobility analysis. The null hypothesis of no difference in intergenerational social mobility between seriously mentally ill and general population control groups cannot be rejected in previous studies by Birtchnell (1971), Goldberg and Morrison (1963), Langner and Michael (1963), and Turner and Wagenfeld (1967). The findings of this study suggest that previous empirical support for intergenerational social mobility differences is an artifact of not controlling for group differences in origins and destinations when collapsed origin-by-destination tables are analyzed. This study suggests that intergenerational social mobility differences between seriously mentally ill and general population groups in previous studies provide very little, if any, empirical support for social selection-drift processes in serious mental illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mirowsky-Ross article "Psychiatric Diagnosis as Reified Measurement" is most remarkable for its derisive attitude toward clinical psychiatrists and their fellow travelers among the ranks of social workers, psychologists, nurses, and even sociologists. The emotional thrust of this article seems to be that psychiatrists have foisted the "language of categories" on unwitting co-workers, patients, and the nosologic field, constructing "mythical entities" for the "social construction of the need for mental health services." Thus the language of categories is the language of the psychiatric guild. Unfortunately, the hortatory message of the article promulgates its own guild polemic. We are hard pressed to discern where the authors stand on the existence of these "mythical entities." Are they suggesting that mental illnesses and the need for treatment are themselves myths or mere social constructions? If this was not intended, it should be made absolutely clear: there truly are mentally ill people with tormented families who do not give a hoot about measurement but who care a great deal that we are slowly, too slowly, finding effective somatic and psychological treatments for these "entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the author's plans as incoming editor of the "Journal of Health and Social Behavior". To prepare for upcoming editorial duties, the author tried to determine whether, within recent years, the periodical has had desirable breadth. Using a category system for mapping the field, a tally of issues since 1978 was conducted. From the survey, two conclusions were made. The first conclusion is that every important corner of the field has been covered. There have been articles on social factors in mental illness, the health effects of stress and multiple roles, health professional education and many other topics. The second conclusion is that there ahave been some strongly accented categories and others which, through present, are heard in a fainter voice. The author also highlighted the importance of medical sociologists in various parts of the field to the continuing soundness of the periodical.