Author: Bowers, Len
Title: The Social Nature of Mental Illness
Description: London / New York, Routledge, (1998). orig.boards. 22x14cm, x, 216 pp. Some minor rubbing, light binding soil, VG. ¶ Contents: Deviance: Classic Labelling Theory; Applications to Mental Illness: Scheff & Gove; Current Status of Deviancy Theory; Deviance as Difference From the Norm...; Rules: Social Order; Rules as a Unitary Phenomenon; Wittgenstein on Rules; Consequences of Mistaken Thinking About Rules...Culture: Importance of the Philosophy of Language; An Example of Philosphical Confusion; Diagnosis: Diagnostic Systems as Cultural Products;Does a Diagnostic System Imply an Illness Model?; Diagnoses, Mechanisms and Causation...History: Temporal Development of Psychiatric Diagnoses; Relativity Versus Continuity; Influence of Concepts Upon Experience; Politics: The Function of Psychiatry; Explaining Away Moral Problems; Ventilation of Emotion...Illness: A Philosophical Problem; Language & Representation; Systematic Ambiguity...Physiology: Psychological Malfunctioning; Relationship of Words to Neurological States; Empirical Arguments Denying Physiological Causation...Social Construct: Physiological Cause a Possibility; Positivism & the Social Sciences; Language & Social Construction; Consequences for Psychiatry.

Keywords: Sociology of Medicine, Social Perception, Psychiatry History, Medical Philosophy, Mental Illness, Diagnoses Diagnosis, Philosophical, Psychiatric Theory, Disease Etiology