Erving Goffman was a Canadian-born American sociologist, social psychologist, and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century".
Medical anthropology studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation". It views humans from multidimensional and ecological perspectives. It is one of the most highly developed areas of anthropology and applied anthropology, and is a subfield of social and cultural anthropology that examines the ways in which culture and society are organized around or influenced by issues of health, health care and related issues.
The biomedical model of medicine is the current dominating model of illness used in most Western healthcare settings, and is built from the perception that a state of health is defined purely in the absence of illness. The biomedical model contrasts with sociological theories of care, and is generally associated with poorer outcomes and greater health inequality when compared to socially-derived models.
Labeling theory posits that self-identity and the behavior of individuals may be determined or influenced by the terms used to describe or classify them. It is associated with the concepts of self-fulfilling prophecy and stereotyping. Labeling theory holds that deviance is not inherent in an act, but instead focuses on the tendency of majorities to negatively label minorities or those seen as deviant from standard cultural norms. The theory was prominent during the 1960s and 1970s, and some modified versions of the theory have developed and are still currently popular. Stigma is defined as a powerfully negative label that changes a person's self-concept and social identity.
Social psychiatry is a branch of psychiatry that focuses on the interpersonal and cultural context of mental disorder and mental wellbeing. It involves a sometimes disparate set of theories and approaches, with work stretching from epidemiological survey research on the one hand, to an indistinct boundary with individual or group psychotherapy on the other. Social psychiatry combines a medical training and perspective with fields such as social anthropology, social psychology, cultural psychiatry, sociology and other disciplines relating to mental distress and disorder. Social psychiatry has been particularly associated with the development of therapeutic communities, and to highlighting the effect of socioeconomic factors on mental illness. Social psychiatry can be contrasted with biopsychiatry, with the latter focused on genetics, brain neurochemistry and medication. Social psychiatry was the dominant form of psychiatry for periods of the 20th century but is currently less visible than biopsychiatry.
Jesse Richard Pitts (1921–2003), was an American sociologist specializing in deviance and social control, family sociology, sociological theory, French society, and criminology. He is considered one of the leading disciples of Talcott Parsons, dean of American sociologists for much of the 20th century. Pitts is perhaps best known for his contributions to a large textbook on sociology, Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory, edited by Parsons and published in 1961. He pioneered sociological work on marginality, deviance and conformity. He was interested particularly in criminology and the institutional treatment of mental illness. Raised on both sides of the Atlantic, Pitts felt at home in France as much as in the United States. He created the Franco-American periodical The Tocqueville Review, serving as editor from 1978 to 1991.
Nikolas Rose is a British sociologist and social theorist. He is Distinguished Honorary Professor at the Research School of Social Sciences, in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University and Honorary Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London. From January 2012 to until his retirement in April 2021 he was Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London, having joined King's to found this new Department. He was the Co-Founder and Co-Director of King's ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health. Before moving to King's College London, he was the James Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, director and founder of LSE's BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society from 2002 to 2011, and Head of the LSE Department of Sociology (2002–2006). He was previously Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was Head of the Department of Sociology, Pro-Warden for Research and Head of the Goldsmiths Centre for Urban and Community Research and Director of a major evaluation of urban regeneration in South East London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Arts and the Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Sussex, England, and Aarhus University, Denmark.
Peter Conrad is an American medical sociologist who has researched and published on numerous topics including ADHD, the medicalization of deviance, the experience of illness, wellness in the workplace, genetics in the news, and biomedical enhancements.
David Allen Karp is a Professor of Sociology at Boston College where he has taught since 1971. He received his B.A. degree from Harvard University in 1966 and his Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University in 1971. He has written or co-authored nine books and more than fifty journal articles and book chapters. His work appears in such periodicals as Symbolic Interaction, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Journal of Qualitative Health Research, the Gerontologist, and the International Journal of Aging and Human Development. His work has largely clustered in three areas: urban life and culture, aging, and the study of mental health and illness.
Thomas J. Scheff is an American Professor, Emeritus, Department of Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara. His fields of study are the emotional/relational world, mental illness, restorative justice, and collective violence. He holds a BS from the University of Arizona in Physics (1950), and a PhD in sociology from the University of California (Berkeley) (1960). He was at University of Wisconsin from 1959–63, when he joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Lee Nelken Robins was an American professor of social science in psychiatry and a leader in psychiatric epidemiology research. She was affiliated with the Washington University in St. Louis for more than 50 years from 1954 until 2007.
Joan Busfield, is a British sociologist and psychologist, Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and former President of the British Sociological Association (2003–2005). Her research focuses on psychiatry and mental disorder.
Robin Michele Mathy is an author, activist, and editor. She has published four books and more than 50 peer-reviewed articles or book chapters.
Judith Lorber is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Women’s Studies at The CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is a foundational theorist of social construction of gender difference and has played a vital role in the formation and transformation of gender studies. She has more recently called for a de-gendering of the social world.
Sociology of Health & Illness (SHI) is a peer-reviewed academic journal which covers the sociological aspects of health, illness, medicine, and health care. It is published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness. Established in 1979, the journal was originally published by Routledge and Kegan Paul. The Editorial Team is currently led by Karen Lowton and Flis Henwood as joint Editors in Chief. Other members of the team are: Dr Catherine Will, Dr Ben Fincham, Dr Catherine Theodosius, Professor Gillian Bendelow and Dr Sasha Scambler.
George Rosen (1910–1977) was an American physician, public health administrator, journal editor, and medical historian. His major interests were in the relationship of social, economic and cultural factors upon health.
Byron Joseph Good is an American medical anthropologist primarily studying mental illness. He is currently on the faculty of Harvard University, where he is Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology.
Medical sociology is the sociological analysis of medical organizations and institutions; the production of knowledge and selection of methods, the actions and interactions of healthcare professionals, and the social or cultural effects of medical practice. The field commonly interacts with the sociology of knowledge, science and technology studies, and social epistemology. Medical sociologists are also interested in the qualitative experiences of patients, often working at the boundaries of public health, social work, demography and gerontology to explore phenomena at the intersection of the social and clinical sciences. Health disparities commonly relate to typical categories such as class and race. Objective sociological research findings quickly become a normative and political issue.
Leonard Irving Pearlin was an American sociologist whose work focused on the sociology of mental illness. Much of this work centered around the "stress process model", a model he developed to attempt to explain the relationship between stress and mental health. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1956. He worked at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for over two decades, where he worked with such researchers as Melvin L. Kohn and Carmi Schooler to study the sociology of mental health. In 1982, he left the NIMH to join the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as Professor in the Human Development and Aging Program, of which he served as director from 1982 to 1984. He was also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior from 1982 to 1984. In 1994, he retired from UCSF to join the University of Maryland as a Graduate Professor and Senior Research Scientist; he remained a professor there until his retirement in 2007. In 2000, he and his wife, Gerrie, established the Leonard I. Pearlin Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Sociological Study of Mental Health, which is given by the Section on the Sociology of Mental Health of the American Sociological Association.
John Adam Clausen was an American sociologist and academic. After holding various positions during the 1940s, Clausen joined the National Institute of Mental Health in 1948 as a research consultant. With the institute, he led an environmental social science research laboratory he created from 1951 to 1960. As a part of the NIMH, he also conducted research on schizophrenia and mental health. In 1960, Cluasen became a sociology professor for the University of California, Berkeley and continued to teach until his retirement in 1982.
