DST 500 Lecture 3: Week 3 Lecture - Collective Madness

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Disability Studies
• Course: DST 500
• Professor: Jenna Reid

Document Summary

Necessary to look beyond the individual in terms of causal factors and in terms of the way mental illness is dealt with. We talked about important structural factors social context is important: society is somehow sick or disordered. Aggregate insanity looking at rates in certain populations. Collective madness: populations of people and their actions. Societal insanity: global properties of society and how they re evaluated. Not what s happening with society, but what s happening at the societal level. Must not be an expectable response, but a manifestation of behavioural, psychological, or biological dysfunction. Dsm 5 cannot be a disorder unless it comes from individual dysfunction: terms are put individually based. Difficulty to decide what s mad: and what s sane as everyone has different perceptions of what s acceptable in societal norms, and people may have different definitions for what s considered insane: no scientific way of deciding that.