Mental health and Social Inequality

Running Head: MENTAL HEALTH AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY

Mental Health and Social Inequality

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Mental Health and Social Inequality

There is limited knowledge about relationships among social control mechanisms in at least two important areas. The first is the direction of these relationships. Some sociologists suggest that social controls imposed within society often lie in oppositional (i.e., inverse) relation with each other. Different forms of control may serve as substitutes for each other or may displace each other over time--that is, as one increases in frequency or use, others decrease. For example, as hospitalizations for mental illness increase in a particular area or region, imprisonments for crime within the same area may decrease. However, other scholars argue that the imposition of one type of control reinforces or parallels the imposition of another type of control. In this case, controls increase or decrease parallel to or in conjunction with each other in relation to other social forces.

Issues in Mental Health Nursing

English: Institute of Mental Health building in Be...

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The linkages between mental health and criminal justice apparatuses of the state enable them to complement each other in controlling socially unacceptable behaviour.

Numerous studies examine the structure and functions of the criminal justice system as the major social control bureaucracy; including studies of prison size and admission rates, prosecution rates, arrest rates, and police contact rates. More recently studies have also examined the structure and functions of the mental health system, focusing on factors that influence its size and social composition, and the structure and functions of the social welfare system, focusing on factors that influence its size and scope. Additionally; studies examine informal community control patterns and collective forms of social control. (Lindow, 1994)

Most macro research takes the form of case studies, which only weakly test sociological perspectives on deviance and crime control. Most...