Symbolic Interactionalist Perspective

Symbolic interactionist’s like to understand the world through understanding the specific meanings and causes that society attributes to particular events. When analyzing health and illness symbolic interactionist’s like to look at individuals or groups and how they give meaning to their particular illness. Then they take that information and see how it affects their relationships with others and how it makes them view themselves. The symbolic interactionist theory also claims that we socially construct health and illness much like we do with race. For instance if someone spends his days staring at the sun and goes blind people blame him for staring at the sun. They believe that if they do not engage in sun staring then they will not go blind. The same reasoning usually follows people who get lung cancer or AIDS. The person is blamed for having the illness regardless of how they got it; people assume the sick brought it upon themselves.
There is no doubt that there are biological attributes that can clearly define an illness however there is also a human arbitrary element. For instance at one point being homosexual was considered a mental illness, that is no longer the case. The process of giving nonmedical issues medical treatments and attributes is known as medicalization. This can occur on three levels; the conceptual level, the institutional level and the interactional level. The conceptual level usually just consists of using medical jargon to define the problem. The institutional level is where a doctor actually treats and monitors the problem. The interactional level is where doctors actually treat patients’ conditions as medical problems. To clarify think about a person with anxious legs, at the conceptual level ...

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... symbolic interactionist theory the main area of interest is deviance. Medical professionals and society as a whole tend to think of people with a mental illness as deviant. Many people view disabilities as deviant because the person with the disability either cannot conform to societal norms or it would be massively inconvenient for them to do so.
People with mental illness often have their other labels and attributes overlooked and people focus on the illness. The degree to which mentally ill peoples’ other rolls are overlooked is dependent on three factors, if they were or where not responsible for their disability, the apparent severity of the condition, and the perceived legitimacy of their illness. Just as medicalization and demedicalization are societal constructs, the expectations for people that have mental illnesses are also constructed by society.