Social Theory, Psychiatry and Mental Health Services

This chapter describes the development of social concepts within psychiatry and mental services between 1960 and 2010, and the impact of the new ideas developed within social sciences at the time. Concepts and movements considered include: Deinstitutionalisation; Therapeutic Communities; Community Mental Health Teams; Social Constructionism; Labelling Theory; Social Functionalism; Paradigm Shift; Stigma; the Service User Movement; and Social Determinants of Mental Health. There was tension between new post-modernist ideas and the positivist-scientific model that underpinned both social psychiatry of the period and confident, and ultimately hubristic, advocacy of the primacy of neuroscience in psychiatry during “The Decade of the Brain”. Although some new ideas were eventually assimilated by psychiatry, the tension was unresolved in 2010.