Mental Illness as Psychiatric Disorder

Abstract

This chapter describes how psychiatry defines and organizes psychiatric syndromes and identifies the kinds of clinical features associated with the syndromes most relevant to sociological inquiry. The overall goal is to show that the psychiatric perspective of mental illness encompasses more than dichotomous categories for use as outcome variables. Rather, heterogeneity along a number of clinical axes within and among psychiatric disorders offers considerable richness to a sociological understanding of the risks for and outcomes of mental illness. This chapter describes how psychiatry classifies mental illness, catalogues major psychiatric diagnoses and their criteria, and discusses several clinical features of mental illness, as viewed from the psychiatric perspective, that are less often incorporated into sociological studies of mental illness and yet have particular relevance to sociology. In particular, we focus on sources of heterogeneity within psychiatric disorders, specifically on dimensions such as severity, duration, onset, and course.