Psychiatric disorders are commonly viewed through a purely biomedical and/or a psychological framework. In this course, we will apply a sociological imagination to the topic and interrogate the ways in which mental illness, often seen as a supremely private "personal trouble," is also a public issue. We will read the works of classic and contemporary scholars, but we will also use memoirs and films to sensitize us to the experience of mental illness itself. We will explore mental illness as a social construction, stigma, and labeling theory and explore issues of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation in mental illness. |