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This commentary speaks to several issues that arise from the papers in this special issue. Two articles--Kessler (2002) and Mirowsky and Ross (2002)--focus on a major measurement issue: dimensional versus diagnostic-type assessments. One topic requires greater attention: the correspondence of these measures with the underlying states they supposedly measure--constructs in the psychometric tradition and empirically defined illnesses in the medical or psychiatric tradition. Conclusions about the nature of these unobserved states remain tentative at this time. Three articles--Keyes (2002), Schwartz (2002), and Umberson, Williams, and Anderson (2002)--address the expansion of mental health outcomes. The existing reliance on emotional distress is problematic for sociological research because a single disorder is not a good proxy for estimates of the overall mental health consequences of social arrangements. Although these papers present diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives, collectively they demonstrate that no one approach to outcomes is best for all research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper coin pares the conceptions of mental illness held by a group of psychiatrists and a random sample of the general public in the same locality. The hypothesis was that the public, but not the psychiatrists, would tend to consider troublesome behavior as being more indicative of mental illness than non-troublesome behavior. Statements representing five pairs of troublesome non-troublesome types of behavior were rated by both groups as indicators of mental illness. Analysis of the data, using the statements at face value and with a weighting system, did not support the hypothesis. Both public and psychiatrists appear to have similar views but not in the expected order. Most notably, manic behavior ranked very low among the conceptions of mental illness. This finding accords with recent reports of a decline in the incidence of manic- depressive psychoses. Is this decline due to changes in modern society that alter public and psychiatric conceptions of mental illness? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of community mental health as an important system of mental health care delivery has presumably put into practice an ideology that results in what Dinitz and Beran have referred to as "boundary busting." In a previous article (1971), Dinitz and Beran have asserted that community mental health--unlike previously-established systems--has a greatly expanded domain. They conclude that this will erode the boundaries of systems such as traditional mental health and legal systems. This research is an attempt to assess empirically the existence, extent and variations in boundary busting in the role definition of community mental health workers. In a nation-wide sample of community mental health workers, it was found that considerable boundary busting existed from a personal-professional perspective, but was relatively restricted when organizational factors and medical training were taken into account. The analysis suggests both some support for, and some qualification upon, the conclusions of Dinitz and Beran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explores socio-cultural and social-psychological factors associated with the voluntary utilization of a psychiatric outpatient clinic among students on a large university campus. Students who sought psychiatric care as compared to those who did not were (1) more likely to come from groups who were less integrated into traditional social institutions in terms of role expectations, (2) more likely to belong to or identify with other students who were more cosmopolitan in value-orientation and less integrated into the general collegiate milieu, and (3) more likely to have friends with social-emotional problems and were more likely to discuss such problems with greater frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]