The social construction of abnormality

Furthermore, in the socially constructed reality, function plays in integral part in the definition of something. For example, take the question, ‘what is a bucket?’ The response: a bucket is a receptacle that can keep contained liquids, small objects, or whatever else, but what we can see is that the standard answer in social interactions is a functional one. Most people will not answer that it is X material that consists of the chemical make-up of Y, and that is similar to a standard scientific answer. Nevertheless, as one can see, social life is built around the functionality of given states of affairs, and it follows from this presumption that just as objects are explained by their functionality in social life, the psyche is explained by its functionality in social life. Thus, mental illness or disease cannot be measured through theoretical constructs developed through the standard model of scientific inquiry. Consequently, theories within psychiatry cannot satisfy the requirements of the standard model because the unity of method criterion cannot hold in social reality for mental illness is altered by time, for example, homosexuality was considered a mental illness; hence it is not timeless. Further, mental illness is not universal, for example, in African tribes, a person who may be classified as schizophrenic according to the DSM is highly revered in the tribe, and nothing in mental illness is mind independent for all mental illness classifications lie within the mind.

I will now discuss John R. Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality to incorporate the social constructivist perspective that will be used to explain further the reasons for which the theories of mental illness fail to meet the criterion of the standard ...

... middle of paper ...

...matter, is the mental states themselves. Accordingly, a mental dis-ease is an intrinsic mental phenomenon and psychology is attempting to categorize these through a mechanism of observer-relative diagnoses, but these are two different realms of inquiry (i.e. natural kinds versus socially constructed kinds). Hence, Searle would state that mental illness is based on the assignment of function to a classification, such as social phobia, due to the collective intentionality that the social reality has developed, according to which adaptive versus maladaptive notions have been created and the constitutive rules have been defined. The problem for Searle would be the way in which our social reality has created the categorization of these mental states and the ways in which they define mental illness in the assignment of function according to the constitutive rules.