Work and the Political Economy of Stress: Recontextualizing the Study of Mental Health/Illness in Sociology
Work and the Political Economy of Stress: Recontextualizing the Study of Mental Health/Illness in Sociology
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DOI：
10.1007/978-0-387-36320-2_7
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发表时间：
2007-01-01
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Tausig, Mark
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Fenwick, Rudy;Tausig, Mark
心理健康社会学已经产生了一系列关于心理疾病的社会原因和后果的令人印象深刻的发现。然而，对许多研究人员来说，这些发现所产生的见解似乎并没有渗透到该学科的其他部分或其核心。具有讽刺意味的是，最早的社会学论述（马克思、韦伯和涂尔干的论述）建立了这一学科，讨论了社会秩序的心理后果，但目前研究心理健康的社会学家的工作并没有被视为有助于我们对社会的基本理解。在我们看来，答案部分与缺乏研究有关，这些研究将社会中个人和群体之间心理健康结果的不平等分配与更普遍的结构动态联系起来，这些结构动态通常会在收入，财富，地位，权力和认知能力等其他社会，经济和心理回报的分配中产生和重现不平等结果。虽然我们已经认识到，社会地位，如阶级，性别和种族影响暴露于健康风险和获得健康相关的资源（Link & Escheran，1995），我们还没有具体说明这种情况发生的方式或它如何与其他社会经济过程。这在很大程度上是因为，正如Schwartz（2002）所指出的，大多数社会学心理健康研究的结果都是作为个人属性而不是社会地位的特征来设想和衡量的。这种取向的一个缺点是它掩盖了社会结构和过程与社会影响之间的联系。事实上，它使心理健康结果成为“人与环境”不匹配的反常或病态结果，而不是社会组织和不平等的常规结果。解决这一问题的一个战略是制定一个模型，明确这些个人的成果及其分布，以社会经济结构和过程，在宏观/社会层面和中观/组织层面上运作。这种方法直接将心理健康研究插入到其他社会学子领域的研究话语中，并将其与社会组织和社会不平等的核心社会学问题联系起来。我们认为，心理健康的结果需要被理解为结构动态的结果，产生社会不平等的一般，而不仅仅是在精神疾病的分布不平等。
The sociology of mental health has produced an impressive set of findings about the social causes and consequences of mental illness. Yet, to many researchers, it seems that the insights produced by these findings have not penetrated other parts of the discipline or to its core. One irony of this situation is that the earliest sociological expositions (those of Marx, Weber and Durkheim) that established the discipline discussed the psychological consequences of social order, yet the current work of sociologists studying mental health is not seen as contributing to our basic understanding of society.How has this come to pass? In our view, the answer is partly related to the absence of research that links the unequal distribution of mental health outcomes across individuals and groups in society to more general structural dynamics that routinely produce and reproduce unequal outcomes in the distribution of other social, economic and psychological rewards, such as income, wealth, status, power and cognitive abilities. While we have recognized that social positions such as class, gender and race affect exposure to health risk and access to healthrelated resources (Link & Phelan, 1995), we have yet to specify exactly the way in which this occurs or how it is related to other socioeconomic processes. This is largely because, as Schwartz (2002) points out, most sociological mental health research works with outcomes conceived and measured as individual attributes and not as characteristics of social positions. One drawback of this orientation is that it obscures the linkages between social structures and processes and social effects. Indeed, it makes mental health outcomes an anomic or pathological result of “personenvironment” misfit rather than a routine result of social organization and inequality. A strategy for addressing this issue is to elaborate a model that explicitly links these individual outcomes–and their distributions–to socioeconomic structures and processes that operate both on the macro/societal level and the meso/organization level. Such an approach directly inserts mental health research into the research discourse of other sociological subfields and links it to central sociological questions of social organization and social inequality. We suggest that mental health outcomes need to be understood as outcomes of structural dynamics that produce social inequality in general, and not solely in terms of inequalities in the distributions of mental illness.