SOCIOL 703

Sociology of Mental Health


Please note: this is archived course information from 2021 for SOCIOL 703.

Description

This course is taught through a weekly three hour session consisting of both a lecture and discussion (though at postgraduate, the two are very much combined). The University’s general expectation is that each postgraduate course requires an average of twenty hours work per week. This includes attendance at each session, reading of the required texts, and additional study towards reaching the learning outcomes, and successfully completing the related assignments.

Course objectives

By the end of the course, students will be able to

  • Critically evaluate medicine’s and psychiatry’s focus on behaviour considered ‘sick’ or ‘abnormal’ as part of the more general process of modernity
  • Critically assess medicine and psychiatry as social, economic, cultural and political - as well as medical - projects
  • Critically evaluate the profession of psychiatry through use of relevant social and sociological theory
  • Place medicine and psychiatry within its wider social, cultural, economic and political contexts
  • Critically debate current key topics within the sociology of mental health

Assessment:

Coursework

Availability 2021

Semester 2

Lecturer(s)

Coordinator(s) Dr Bruce Cohen

Reading/Texts

There is no textbook for this course, all mandatory readings will be available via Canvas.

Recommended Reading

Additional readings which are very useful for grounding students in the key issues covered on this course:

Cohen, B. M. Z. (Ed.) (2018) Routledge International Handbook of Critical Mental Health. Abingdon: Routledge.

Cohen, B. M. Z. (2016) Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Conrad, P. and Schneider, J. (1992) Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness (rev. edn). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Fernando, S. (2010) Mental Health, Race and Culture (3rd edn). Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kutchins, H. and Kirk, S. A. (1997) Making Us Crazy: DSM - The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders. New York: Free Press.

Moloney, P. (2013) The Therapy Industry: The Irresistible Rise of the Talking Cure, and Why It Doesn’t Work. London: Pluto Press.

Moncrieff, J. (2009) The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment (rev. edn). Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,

Pilgrim, D. (2005) Key Concepts in Mental Health. London: SAGE.

Szasz, T. S. (2010) The Myth of Mental lllness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (rev. edn). New York: Harper Perennial.

Scheff, T. J. (1966) Being Mentally Ill: A Sociological Theory. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Scull, A. (2015) Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ussher, J. M. (2011) The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience. Hove: Routledge.

 

 

Points

SOCIOL 703: 30 points