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Bourdieu’s theory of fields: towards understanding help-seeking practices in mental distress

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Abstract

Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology and his conceptual triad of field, habitus and capital, this article outlines a theoretical approach to empirically analyse help-seeking practices in mental distress. The framework helps to examine why the treatment gap in common mental disorders is wider in one setting than another and why some agents access healthcare more easily than others within the same setting, which may even drive to both over- and under-treatment resulting in inequities of access and poor use of resources. To understand help-seeking behaviour that varies across settings, time and conditions, it is suggested to relationally analyse how the field of mental healthcare as a structure of positions impacts access to healthcare; how mental structures that mirror cultural context and social conditions where they were acquired influence perceptions of access and, therefore, strategies of help seeking; and what historical genesis of both mental and objectified structures is.

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Acknowledgements

An earlier draft of this article was presented at the 17th Biennial Conference of European Society for Health and Medical Sociology (ESHMS) in Lisbon (Portugal). I would like to express my gratitude to Gerry Veenstra and Thomas Abel for their valuable comments at the conference.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Oviedo, Campus de El Cristo, 33006, Oviedo, Spain

    Sigita Doblytė

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Correspondence to Sigita Doblytė.

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Doblytė, S. Bourdieu’s theory of fields: towards understanding help-seeking practices in mental distress. Soc Theory Health 17, 273–290 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41285-019-00105-0

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