The Moral Construction of Diagnosis: ‘Sickness made for anyone’

Abstract

The previous chapters have argued that families are likely to feel as though they had lost the relative they knew and were therefore experiencing a complex grief. It has already been observed that families seemed to make recourse, with little hesitation, to a medical understanding of what had happened. The evidence of the previous chapter suggests that it might be wrong to suppose that the families were simply internalizing the model of illness from professionals. This chapter will explore the ideas that families had about what might have caused their relatives’ difficulties. These relatives generally held eclectic and often complex views. This finding that individuals could make use of different theories is in keeping with Furnham and Bower’s (1992) work on lay beliefs about mental illness and more general work on Western lay beliefs (Fitzpatrick 1989). This chapter is written with the aim of looking beneath that eclecticism in order to chart the forces that are shaping those ideas. Those forces, it will be argued, reveal a more complicated picture than that suggested by the idea that psychiatric diagnoses arise simply from the medicalization of Western culture.