Meaning and Explanations of Mental Illness

Shikha Dixit
Additional contact information
Shikha Dixit: Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

Psychology and Developing Societies, 2005, vol. 17, issue 1, 1-18

Abstract: The notion of mental illness may be closely related to the social values pertinent in any social context. The meaning of mental illness rooted in everyday social psychological processes may be different from scientific and clinical understanding. In order to examine the common meaning of mental illness, the relationship between individual knowledge and implicit social knowledge needs to be explored. This can be achieved by studying the social representation of mental illness. This paper provides an understanding of the content of social representation of mental illness among a group of engineering students, and extends the findings to the broader social context of educated urban middle class youth. A qualitative study was conducted within the theoretical context of the social representations framework. The findings revealed that social representation of mental illness was structured in terms of social understanding of the causes and consequences of mental illness. Further, mental illness derived its meaning from the expectations and norms of society. Mental illness was generally labelled as a form of social deviance and viewed as including an element of volition. The social definition of mental illness appeared to be rooted in the social value that non–normative behaviours that are not in line with the expectations of society are related to mental illness. An interesting feature that was observed was the use of narratives to explain the meaning of mental illness.

Date: 2005
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/097133360501700101 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:psydev:v:17:y:2005:i:1:p:1-18

DOI: 10.1177/097133360501700101

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Psychology and Developing Societies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().