Is That Contagious? If It's A Viewpoint, Yes.

How do people decide what is an illness? A social constructionist would argue that an illness is not inherently something that makes someone feel sick, but is interpreted in that way because people choose to. Conrad and Barker point out that as a society decides what they will consider to be an illness, they also decide how the illness will be viewed. For the person dealing with the illness, a social constructionist would say that the individual’s social group plays an important role in how the individual experiences the illness. While one might receive an abundance of casseroles after undergoing chemotherapy, they might feel ostracized by their community after coming home from a stay in a mental institution. In many places around the world mental illness is stigmatized, leaving the sufferers feeling that it is wrong the share and seek help for their conditions. How people experience illness is based upon how those around them view the illness, depending on cultural values and interpretations.

Look at China as an example. Lam et al. discuss how different beliefs in the Chinese culture create intensely negative ideas about mental illness, ascribing it to an imbalance of the soul. This, combined with the collectivist ideals of the Chinese, lead many people to not want to share that they are suffering with mental illness because it can lead to shame not only on the individual but on entire families and communities. Keeping in mind the argument that illnesses are experienced based on how those around us perceive the illness, I would say that for someone from China having a mental illness probably brings about a lot of personal shame. The sufferer most likely feels that they have let down their entire family by having a mental illness. This significantly affects how people experience having mental illness because they lack support systems and do not feel that they can reach out for help. I would argue that this creates a Catch-22 scenario because the stigma surrounding mental illness makes the sufferers feel even worse about themselves, thus leading to more severe mental illness, and the cycle repeats itself.

A social constructionist would also argue that what we perceive as scary or frightening is also a product of society. Luhrmann et al. looked at the experiences of people hearing voices in different countries around the world. In the U.S., hearing voices was perceived as something very bad and a sign of brain disease. The people who heard the voices had negative relationships with them. Those interviewed from India and Ghana who had heard voices had stated experiences of more positive interactions and sought guidance from the voices. So is it simply that voices heard by people in the U.S. are mean and those in other countries are kinder? No, definitely not. People in the U.S. grow up learning that hearing voices is a bad thing. From my own experience and the experiences that I have talked about with my peers, we have never once been told that hearing voices can be a good thing. When people in the U.S. develop a psychological disorder that causes them to hear voices and these voices tell them to do terrible things, it isn’t because of some genetic programming to have negative delusions. It’s because in American society we are led to believe that hearing voices is exclusively bad, and we interpret it as such. People from India and Ghana may know that hearing voices isn’t necessarily normal, but they have been taught that it can be a way to connect with spirits. I believe that because they don’t automatically associate the voices with something bad, they can interpret the voices as unthreatening and their brain adapts the voices to this view.

Lastly, we all get sad sometimes. We fail tests, get in fights, our favorite Grey’s Anatomy character dies. I believe that having periods of time where you feel low is a normal part of life. That was how the majority of Japan felt too, until antidepressants were being prescribed left and right to people. This begs the question of if all of these people were depressed all along or if they had started to believe that sadness was an illness. I believe it was the latter. Suddenly, feeling sad became a disease that had to be cured. Conrad and Barker would argue (as would I) that when depression and antidepressants became mainstream news in Japan, people started to believe that feeling down was something that needed to be medically treated, and so they sought treatment for what was now being classified as a disease. I would say that some sadness is a normal and natural part of life; it is when we begin to classify it as a disease that it starts to become an outlier of the human experience.

What are the implications behind how societies view illness, specifically mental illness? Well, what people see as illness and how they see it affects treatment options. Something has to be classified as needing treatment in order to be treated. On a large scale this impacts available medications and whether or not insurance agencies will pay for those medications. On a smaller scale, it impacts how people feel about themselves, based on how their social circle views them, as well as available treatments. Although most of the time people do not realize how much of an impact views on illnesses really have, I would argue that these views create those illnesses, and those creations impact how every single illness is experienced.