The sociologization of psychiatric diagnoses, that is, examining psychiatric diagnoses from a sociological perspective, is something that has been done by several sociologists (e.g., Rose, 1999; Paulsen, 2020; Scheff, 1999; Illouz, 2013). Having this as an alternative is likely beneficial, since some of these concepts are familiar to people and have become important due to psychology’s historical dominance in therapy and our thinking about ourselves. Completely switching to a new conceptual framework would, for some people, create unnecessarily strong resistance and cause them to miss the potential of thinking from a sociological perspective.
Cultural psychiatry already exists as a field that views certain diagnoses as “culture, bound”; it is part of medical anthropology, which contrasts with the tendency of most psychiatrists toward universalism, though recently a certain degree of cultural sensitivity has emerged (Morrall, 2018, 143). The sociologization of psychiatric diagnoses is also a trend that is gaining momentum more broadly, with syntheses between neurology and the social sciences, for example within “social neuroscience” (Morall, 2018, 183, 185). Nikolas Rose and David Armstrong are the most prominent sociologists who have argued for a synthesis between neurology, based psychiatry and sociology, a field known as social psychiatry (Morall, 2018, 184). At the same time, there is a general resistance within sociology to incorporating genetic and neurological components, on the grounds that they may overly biologize and reify socially constructed conditions and phenomena (Turner et al., 2017).
A central problem with the sociologization of psychiatric diagnoses is that it relies on diagnoses that have significant issues regarding scientific rigor, validity, and reliability (Scull, 2022). This would mean that socioanalysis would be built on an unstable foundation, which is undesirable.
Nevertheless, the sociologizations that have been undertaken have been fruitful in helping us better understand the society we live in and the conditions we claim to find ourselves in. Applying a sociological perspective to psychiatric diagnoses becomes a way to resist psychiatric hegemony (Cohen, 2016).