{"id":122686,"date":"2025-05-22T13:59:16","date_gmt":"2025-05-22T13:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/122686\/"},"modified":"2025-05-22T13:59:16","modified_gmt":"2025-05-22T13:59:16","slug":"why-we-need-sociology-at-the-heart-of-mental-health-discourse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/122686\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We Need Sociology at the Heart of Mental Health Discourse"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Sociology teaches that although social forces are not always visible, they are constantly at work, shaping relationships, systems, and experience. In a recent chapter titled \u201cA Critical Manifesto for the Sociology of Mental Health\u201d<\/a>, sociologist Bruce Cohen<\/a>, writing from New Zealand, urges the field of psychiatry to grapple with this reality.<\/p>\n

Writing from New Zealand, Cohen makes a forceful case for the inclusion of sociological frameworks in mental health research and practice, arguing that psychiatry cannot be understood, or transformed, without first recognizing its role in reproducing social hierarchies.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWhether you are based in neuroscience, psychology, chemistry, or the humanities,\u201d Cohen writes, \u201csociological insight and explorations of mental health and illness are of profound significance to modern research endeavours as they provide understandings, interpretations, and theories which can go beyond pathology, disease labels, and the current hegemony of the biomedical model.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The chapter appears in the edited volume Zur Gesellschaft der verletzten Seelen: Neue soziologische Perspektiven auf Psychiatrie, Gesellschaft und Subjekt (Volume title in original German\u2014translated as On the Society of Wounded Souls: New Sociological Perspectives on Psychiatry, Society, and the Subject).<\/p>\n

Cohen\u2019s \u201ccritical manifesto\u201d traces how mental distress is often socially produced and politically managed, and why any effort to rethink mental health must also interrogate the institutions and ideologies that shape what counts as illness and who gets to decide.<\/p>\n

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\n Previous articleFamily Traditions and the Inheritance of \u201cMadness\u201d<\/a>Next articleThe Poetics and Politics of Our Mental Health Metaphors: An Interview with Laurence Kirmayer<\/a> \"Kelli<\/a><\/p>\n

Kelli has two Master\u2019s degrees, in Criminal Justice and Sociology. In 2024, Kelli was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters and a Kentucky Colonel designation for her demonstrated contributions to academia, her community, and professionally. She believes that qualitative research methods can provide a deeper understanding of social systems and experiences. Kelli has her own experiences with the mental health care system as a late-diagnosed autistic woman. Those experiences, as well as her academic training and advocacy work the past 20 years, motivates her to help bring about a fundamental shift in how we approach mental health care, especially for the most vulnerable in our society. She resides in Kansas.<\/p>\n


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