SOC313H1 Lecture Notes - Eye Contact, Erving Goffman, Human Potential Movement
Document Summary
We can not tell the normal from the abnormal. Great deal of conflict on reliability, utility, and sanity insanity mental. In court, psychiatrists try to find out the defendants sanity illness and schizophrenia . What is viewed normal in one culture may not be in another. To figure out this question, we need to ask if diagnosis are in the patients or the environment. Belief that patients present symptoms that differentiate the sane from the insane this is questioned. Psychiatric diagnoses, in this view, are in the minds of the observers and are not valid summaries of characteristics displayed by the observed. Psychiatric diagnosis betrays little about the patient but much about the environment in which an observer finds him. In this article, 8 sane people gain secret access to mental hospitals. Pseudopatients is the researcher pretending to be a patient.
