Review of Chapter 3 Sociology of Mental Illness

The Sociology of Mental Illness

By Bernard J Gallagher III

Chapter 3 - Environmental Theories of Mental Illness

                        The Influence of Social Stress

In Chapter 3 I learned that Freud takes a lot of credit for his work into the human mind. I also learned that sometimes conditions can be heritary and that we need to look at our up bringing to find out that there is a way to stop the mental illness from starting.

There are many types of mental disorder but they can be safely labeled into three categories psychotic, anxieties, and personality disorders, and there are many different therories to best describe why they happen and how to treat them.

Anxieties disorders have an added advantage that the person suffering from anxiety can have a secondary gain.(pg 58, pr 4 Sociology of Mental Illness) The secondary gain is basically like someone with flying phobia and they  their take their pill and go on a plane and they feel fine flying to their destination. I have anxiety and I take ativan to reduce my social stress anxiety attacks after I take the medication I feel fine.

The Social Stress theory looks at society and the individual. It takes a look at why the individual is acting deviant to the way society works.(pg 59 pr 2 Sociology of Mental Illness) Sometimes this can happen because the individual was brought up in a way that society demans unworthy or deviant to the laws of society. Mostly this is because the individual is not thinking clearly when he makes the first attempt and dose not know right from wrong that situation. Like for an example the fact that a man marries his sister.

Some times the society that goes into a recession can produce people that will be horders. There are also times that person that is born under wealth and than becomes a mentally ill can loose their status and fall deeper into their mental illness and farther down the wealth chain that they become traumatized into thinking they are still rich and try to live accordingly.

War causes people to behave in a different manner,. When the armies are fighting there is a resistance to what they see. They tend to try to revert back to their safety zone when they are kids in order to feel safe again. Some of the military people try tend to get a system called PTSD. PTSD other wise known as Post Tramatic Stress Disorder is a when people keep reliving the tramatic event that had happened. The writer of the book says that some of the kids from the concentration camps where help as pets. This thus caused the kids to revert back to their animal instincts just to stay alive. When they grew older and received their freedom they did not know how to act right in today's society.

In culture we find that people that act without consent of the law or social ways are treated as though they have the curse. Some people in foreign countries are used to going to the Medicine Man to be healed of their inflictions. These medicine man try to ward out the demond and other spirits possessing the body by using technics that are considered to be unothordox methods.

The labeling theory is basically a social reaction to the mentally ill. Some say this is a bad method to label people mentally ill because it teaches them not to have an excuse to act the way they do. Others feel that if they label the individual as mentally ill then that individual will they treatment they truly need. The labeling theory was designed and created by Charles Cooley and George Herbert Mead. They believed that one's personality is largely a reflection of how an individual interprets other people's reactions to him. (pg 67 pr 5 Sociology of Mental Illness)

A negative self-image can create feeling of inadequacy forms the core of a later mental illness. This negative self-image than can resurface during the adult life and create havoic within the individual is caused by the child never receiving any love, support, or enough care during the time that child is growing up. I believe that if you rare the child up with a good Christian background than the child will be able to receive love and care and affection. (pg 68 pr 1 Sociology of Mental Illness)

The Social learning theory is based on what the child learns from both home and outside the home will teach the child to be either a good upstanding individual of cause him to have emotional and phyisical challengers when he grows up to be an adult. The problem with diagnosing a person with only the social learning theory is that it only looks a person from the outside and not the inside thus forgetting and neglecting on what is going on in the emotions department. The social learning theory is like looking at a glass and only seeing that is half empty instead of seeing it as half full.

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