Sociology teaches that although social forces are not always visible, they are constantly at work, shaping relationships, systems, and experience. In a recent chapter titled “A Critical Manifesto for the Sociology of Mental Health”, sociologist Bruce Cohen, writing from New Zealand, urges the field of psychiatry to grapple with this reality.
Writing from New Zealand, Cohen makes a forceful case for the inclusion of sociological frameworks in mental health research and practice, arguing that psychiatry cannot be understood, or transformed, without first recognizing its role in reproducing social hierarchies.
“Whether you are based in neuroscience, psychology, chemistry, or the humanities,” Cohen writes, “sociological insight and explorations of mental health and illness are of profound significance to modern research endeavours as they provide understandings, interpretations, and theories which can go beyond pathology, disease labels, and the current hegemony of the biomedical model.”
The chapter appears in the edited volume Zur Gesellschaft der verletzten Seelen: Neue soziologische Perspektiven auf Psychiatrie, Gesellschaft und Subjekt (Volume title in original German—translated as On the Society of Wounded Souls: New Sociological Perspectives on Psychiatry, Society, and the Subject).
Cohen’s “critical manifesto” traces how mental distress is often socially produced and politically managed, and why any effort to rethink mental health must also interrogate the institutions and ideologies that shape what counts as illness and who gets to decide.
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