Returning to the Fray: Revisiting What Social Science Can Offer Psychiatry … and Vice Versa

Abstract

Historical accounts establish without doubt that a set of social disruptions—variously described as madness, possession, lunacy, mental illness, mental disorder or mental health difficulties—are an inevitable feature of organised society. They also establish that time has seen a series of approaches to them come and go. That equally applies to the medical approach which has dominated Western practice for much of the last half century (Scull 2015). By accepting responsibility for “mental health difficulties”, medicine has provided the field with a welcome certainty. As we outline, there are grounds to doubt the assumptions upon which this is founded, and so although “mental health difficulties” may be inevitable, there is growing uncertainty about how they might best be construed, conceptualised and addressed. That uncertainty could be an opportunity for social scientists of both practical and theoretical persuasions to return to a field where they once made seminal contributions (see, for instance, Goffman 1961 and Rosenhan 1973).