Definitions and diagnoses: cultural implications of psychiatric help-seeking and psychiatrists' definitions of the situation in psychiatric emergencies

Abstract

This paper explores lay and psychiatric actors' definitions of mental illness by focusing on several aspects of emergency psychiatric diagnosis. First, it considers psychiatric diagnosis as a social and cultural process in which mental illnesses are defined with increasing specificity as individuals move from lay to psychiatric contexts. Second, the paper considers variation in psychiatric residents' conceptions of mental illness, their role in emergency contexts, and lastly, their diagnostic styles. Diagnostic styles are shown to exist and to be grounded in residents' definitions of the situation. It is suggested that the variation in psychiatrists' definitions of the psychiatric situation, especially as regards etiology, plays a prominent, but as yet unnoted, role in producing variability in psychiatric diagnosis. It is also argued that actors' definitions are cultural, grounded in non-professional lay ideology, and are not products of secondary professional socialization.