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Accompanying the ageing of contemporary ageing societies is an increase in age associated morbidity, with dementia having an important impact. Mental frailty in later life is a source of fear for many and a major policy concern to all those concerned with health and welfare services. This introduction to the special issue on 'Ageing, dementia and the social mind' situates the selected papers within the context of debates about dementia and its social relations. In particular it draws attention to the importance of the social imaginary of the fourth age and what this means for the issue of personhood, care, social representations of dementia and its social contextualisation. The papers illuminating these themes draw on a variety of disciplines and approaches; from the social sciences to the humanities and from the theoretical to the empirical in order to help orientate future researchers to the complexities of dementia and the social and cultural matrix in which it exists. This paper provides an introduction to the potential for a more extended sociology of dementia; one which could combine the insights from medical sociology with the concerns of social gerontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically explores the research and development of 'digital phenotyping', which broadly refers to the idea that digital data can measure and predict people's mental health as well as their potential risk for mental ill health. Despite increasing research and efforts to digitally track and predict ill mental health, there has been little sociological and critical engagement with this field. This paper aims to fill this gap by introducing digital phenotyping to the social sciences. We explore the origins of digital phenotyping, the concept of the digital phenotype and its potential for benefit, linking these to broader developments within the field of 'mental health sensing'. We then critically discuss the technology, offering three critiques. First, that there may be assumptions of normality and bias present in the use of algorithms; second, we critique the idea that digital data can act as a proxy for social life; and third that the often biological language employed in this field risks reifying mental health problems. Our aim is not to discredit the scientific work in this area, but rather to call for scientists to remain reflexive in their work, and for more social science engagement in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of childbirth emerged in the 1970s largely as a result of influences from outside sociology. These included feminism, maternity care activism, the increasing medicalisation of childbirth, and evidence-based health care. This paper uses the author's own sociological 'career' to map a journey through four decades of childbirth research. It demonstrates the importance of social networks and interdisciplinary work, particularly across the medical-social science divide and including cross-cultural perspectives, argues that the study of reproduction has facilitated methodological development within the social sciences, and suggests that childbirth remains on the periphery of mainstream sociological concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that children, as an important social group, repay study in connection with the sociology of health and illness. The paper outlines the neglect of children within medical sociology and goes on to open up a discussion towards a sociology of child health. The paper makes three main points. First, consideration of the case of health and illness helps understanding of children's social positioning as a minority group. Secondly, children present a clear case for considering people as embodied health care actors. Thirdly, taking account of children in the sociology of health requires rethinking the division of labour and inter-generational relationships within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article the authors comment on the views of sociologists Rona Campbell and Sam Porter, on a paper on feminist theory and the sociology of human reproduction written by them. The authors clarify that while feminists and midwives may hold ideas in common, feminist and midwifery practice are diverse and contested fields and there is no intrinsic affinity between the two. In their earlier paper they argued that feminism is not disinterested in its response to midwifery. It is further argued that differences which have become increasingly vociferous within feminism have tended to be neglected within the sociology of health and illness, and proposed that post-structuralist approaches might provide a fruitful, although certainly not unproblematic, counterpoint to a range of modernist feminist perspectives as they relate to gender and reproduction. In response to Campbell and Porter's criticism for ignoring recent midwifery and social science research on midwifery practice, it is clarified that the authors never intended to question midwifery's credentials in working with childbearing women.

Sociologists appear to have abandoned the study of serious mental illness. This paper argues that the work of the disability theorists provides new directions for an analysis of the plight of people suffering from serious mental illness. Disability theory, revolving around a 'social approach to disability', redirects analysis from the individual to processes of social oppression, discrimination and exclusion. The application of the ideas of disability theorists to the study of mental ill health will orient research and theoretical development towards an analysis of the complexity and multiplicity of the social restrictions faced by people diagnosed as 'mentally ill', and the social disadvantage and oppression they face. A number of vigorous debates within the disability theory literature are examined. One debate addresses the political and theoretical implications of identifying the differences that exist between people with disabilities. A second debate examines the relative importance of including an analysis of impairment in the social approach to disability. Finally, the paper discusses the critique of medical sociology, linking illness with disability, which is advanced by some disability theorists. This debate is particularly concerned with the linking of illness with disability and the ideological and conceptual disadvantages of a focus on illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abby Lippman's geneticisation thesis, of the early 1990s, argued and anticipated that with the rise of genetics, increasing areas of social and health related activities would come to be understood and defined in genetic terms leading to major changes in society, medicine and health care. We review the considerable literature on geneticisation and consider how the concept stands both theoretically and empirically across scientific, clinical, popular and lay discourse and practice. Social science scholarship indicates that relatively little of the original claim of the geneticisation thesis has been realised, highlighting the development of more complex and dynamic accounts of disease in scientific discourse and the complexity of relationships between bioscientific, clinical and lay understandings. This scholarship represents a shift in social science understandings of the processes of sociotechnical change, which have moved from rather simplistic linear models to an appreciation of disease categories as multiply understood. Despite these shifts, we argue that a genetic imaginary persists, which plays a performative role in driving investments in new gene-based developments. Understanding the enduring power of this genetic imaginary and its consequences remains a key task for the social sciences, one which treats ongoing genetic expectations and predictions in a sceptical yet open way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the contribution sociology has made, and can continue to make, to understanding the sociology of mental health and disorder. The ways in which society responds to mental disorder is clearly and distinctively the terrain of sociology and the social sciences. Bio-medicine suggests some simple linkage between medical understandings of disorder and medical responses and treatments between theory and practice. Sociological work on professionalization relates both to the understanding of concepts of mental health and illness and to all areas of psychiatric practice: the treatments that are used and the organizational context of psychiatric work. Here the focus shifts to the persons given formal responsibility for dealing with mental health and illness: psychiatrists and the expanding group of other mental health professionals, such as clinical psychologists, psychiatric social workers, and psychiatric nurses. The importance of such work lies not only in the analysis of the changing power of mental health professionals, but also in understanding the way in which their activities and practices shape mental health services, and the concepts of disorder, aetiological accounts, and treatments they provide.

An integrated model of change in knowledge, highlighting the role of technologic and organisational paradigms and the activities of professional and extra-professional groups, is used to clarify the historical development of psychiatry and to account for current specialty choice trends. American psychiatry and medicine stem from disparate scientific/philosophical roots. A review of events leading to the establishment of psychiatry as a medical specialty indicates that the merger of psychiatry and neurology may have stemmed as much from professional competition as from technological or paradigmatic convergence. Recent perceived declines in the choice of psychiatry as a medical specialty are examined in light of this sociology of knowledge perspective. Declining choice of psychiatry as a specialty reflects both underlying paradigmatic conflicts with medicine as well as declining federal support for psychiatric training. Solutions proposed for the perceived problem within psychiatry are designed to solidify ties with medicine, increase political power and prestige, and retain federal support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the views of the editor on the issue of AIDS as an area of study and his justification for publishing a special issue of the journal "Sociology of Health & Illness," on the subject. The author makes the observation that AIDS as a disease syndrome has a variety of etiological and clinical features which make both public and private responses problematic. It is suggested that research in this field is necessary because it has provoked an unusually strong combination of, on the one hand, universal lip-service in policy circles to the importance of the social sciences, and on the other, a notable reluctance to take their contribution seriously. It is notable that the methods of social science have been specially downgraded in this area. Acknowledging the contribution, the author opines that this is the only health problem where government has taken an active role, often seeming to be impelled by non-health consideration, in the control of health education initiatives?