Meaning and Explanations of Mental Illness: A Social Representations Approach

The notion of mental illness may be closely related to the social values pertinent in any social context. The meaning of mental illness rooted in everyday social psychological processes may be different from scientific and clinical understanding. In order to examine the common meaning of mental illness, the relationship between individual knowledge and implicit social knowledge needs to be explored. This can be achieved by studying the social representation of mental illness. Thu paper provides an understanding of the content of social representation of mental illness among a group of engineering students, and extends the findings to the broader social context of educated urban middle class youth. A qualitative study was conducted within the theoretical context of the social representations framework. The findings revealed that social representation of mental illness was structured in terms of social understanding of the causes and consequences of mental illness. Further, mental illness derived its meaning from the expectations and norms of society. Mental illness was generally labelled as a firm of social deviance and viewed as including an element of volition. The social definition of mental illness appeared to be rooted in the social value that non-normative behaviours that are not in line with the expectations of society are related to mental illness. An interesting feature that was observed was the use of narratives to explain the meaning of mental illness.