Mental Illness and Suicid

• Durkheim 1897: Using Official Statistics hypothesised that suicide was caused by ineffective socialisation and irregulated behaviour from socialisation. Interactionists resists this view due to Durkheim’s reliance on Official Statistics, instead they argue that we should study the individual meanings to each individual suicide. 
• Douglas 1967: Official Crime Statistics on suicide socially constructed by police and coroners and only tell the story of officers rather than the real rate of crime. 

  • Labelling a death as a suicide require negotiation and interactions with social actors such as coroners, relatives and doctors
  • Relatives may feel guilty and thus press for reasons such as misadventure rather than suicide
  • Coroner may have strong religious views against suicide so may be reluctant to label a suicide 
  • To find why people commit suicide we must use qualitative methods
• Atkinson 1978: coroners ideas about the ‘typical suicide’ like certain modes of death and life history can lead to the label of suicide. One coroner said that if the deceased had taken more than 10 sleeping pills, ‘I can be almost sure it was a suicide’. But… Atkinson neglects that this cynical view of statistics leads us to have no information on the number of suicides. 
• Lemert 1962: Individuals who do not easily fit into groups are labelled as odd and are excluded (primary deviance). Individuals' response to this is their secondary deviance ‘mental patient’ becomes their master status. 

  • giving the ‘social audience’ reasons to further exclude them. This may confirm the individual's suspicions that people are conspiring against them causing them to turn to paranoias and thus being labelled as so through being placed in hospital against their will. The label
• Rosenhan 1973: ‘pseudo patient’ experiment. Researchers admitted themselves to hospitals for ‘hearing voices’. They were diagnosed with Schizophrenic, becoming their master status. Pseudo-patients acted normal and yet were kept in hospital. 
• Goffman 1961 -  Asylums study: Within a total institution (Asylum). On admission the inmate undergoes a ‘mortification of the self’ in which their identity is symbolically ‘killed off’ and replaced by a new one: ‘inmate’. This is achieved by ‘degradation rituals’ such as confiscation of personal effects. Goffman notes the similarities with other total institutions such as prisons, armies, monasteries and boarding schools. While some inmates become institutionalised - internalising their new identity, others adopt various forms of resistance to this new status. 
• Branski et al 1969: long term psychiatric patients manipulated theri symptoms to not appear too well or too ill to achieve free movement of the ward. 
• • Law is not a fixed set of rules rather a negotiation 
• • Society’s attempt to control deviance can backfire and create more deviance not less 
• • Too deterministic, deviance can be changed 
• • Ignores real victims of crimes 
• • Focuses on less serious crimes 
• Individuals may actively choose deviance
• • Fails to explain why individuals commit primary deviance 
• • Implies without labelling, deviance would not exist
• Implies deviants are unaware of their deviancy before they are labelled as deviant
• • Fails to analyse the source of labelling power