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This chapter outlines the paucity of media research attending to mental health and mental illness in sport. As such, the purpose of this chapter is to encourage critical reflection and further research on the mass mediation of mental illness in sport.

In the first part of the chapter, we review the extensive literature addressing the mass mediation of mental illness and mental health in order to provide key reference points for future scholarship. We then suggest to potential avenues for sociological study of this topic: Talcott Parson’s sick role and Guy Debord’s spectacle.

The authors find that the notion of the sick role provides insight into the assumptions underpinning athlete disclosure of mental illness as well as encouragement of help seeking behavior in relation to mental illness specifically. From a broader perspective on mental health, the authors identify a central challenge of the spectacular presentation of mental health and well-being and the lived experience.

The central limitation of the field currently is the dearth of research. Similarly, in providing a broad overview of key considerations, this chapter does not undertake primary media analysis of mental illness in sport. Nonetheless, the authors outline key considerations and lines of inquiry for the field.

The chapter revisits the concept of social stigma viewed from the perspective of mental patients integrated in the community based on the example of Geel, Belgium that historically utilized a family care model for a significant number of patients with severe mental illness.

Interpretive analysis of data presented in ethnographies on the Geel colony by Roosens (1979) and Roosens and Van de Walle (2007), showcasing 30 patients’ case studies in addition to research-based author narratives.

This study demonstrates that chronic mental patients tend to reject the sick role and the stigma associated with it by trying to influence their social image and how their status is being defined in the community. They appear to be active managers, not passive recipients of societal attitudes, and, furthermore, functional members of the community. By forgoing exemption from social roles carried by their significant impairment, mental patients continue to be contributing members of their host families, and in some cases develop into caregivers themselves completing the circle of role reversal.

The current analysis utilizes secondary data and therefore is restricted by the information included in the primary research.

The findings allow us to develop a deeper understanding of the social status chronic mental patients acquire in the community, and how it is influenced by the dynamics of social stigmatization and remedial work these social actors are compelled to perform. Additionally, the study contributes to the inclusion of the chronic patients’ perspective in research.

The purpose of this paper is to unpack the tenuous relationship between medical sociology and disability studies, particularly as it relates to the work of Irving Zola.

Many attribute the division between these disciplines to their starkly different and oft competing approaches to disability; however, I argue that a closer examination reveals a number of commonalities between the two.

I use Irving K. Zola’s extensive body of scholarship to demonstrate the connections between these divergent approaches to disability, and imagine what his legacy has to offer to the advancement of a diverse sociology of disability.

Neither focus is more correct than the other, as considering these bodies of work together presents a number of opportunities to advance a more comprehensive sociological theory – not just of disability – but of ableism and its intersections with other forms of oppression as well.

An inquiry into the constitution of the experience of patienthood. It understands “becoming a patient” as a production of a subjectivity, in other words as a process of individuation and milieu that occurs through an ontology of production. This ontology of production can, of course, also be understood as a political ontology. Therefore, this is, first of all, an inquiry into a mode of production, and, secondly, an inquiry into its relation to the issue of social justice – because of effects of digital divisions. In these terms, it also reflects on how expert discourses, such as in medical sociology and science studies (STS), can (and do) articulate their problems.

An integrative mode of discourse analysis, strongly related to discursive institutionalism, called semantic agency theory: it considers those arrangements (institutions, informal organizations, networks, collectivities, etc.) and assemblages (intellectual equipment, vernacular epistemologies, etc.) that are constitutive of how the issue of “patient experience” can be articulated form its position within an ontology of production.

The aim not being the production of a finite result, what is needed is a shift in how “the construction of patient experience” is produced by expert discourses. While the inquiry is not primarily an empirical study and is also limited to “Western societies,” it emphasizes that there is a relation between political ontologies (including the issues of social justice) and the subjectivities that shape the experiences of people in contemporary health care systems, and, finally, that this relation is troubled by the effects of the digital divide(s).

A proposal “to interrogate and trouble” some innovative extensions and revisions – even though it will not be able to speculate about matters of degree – to contemporary theories of biomedicalization, patienthood, and managed care.

Popular self-help pregnancy literature suggests a “generational disconnect” between pregnant women and their mothers, emphasizing the incommensurate experiences of the two generations. Based on longitudinal, in-depth interviews with a diverse group of 64 pregnant women and 23 grandmothers-to-be, this chapter explores how different generations of women negotiate the idea of a disconnect and its implications for the medicalization of pregnancy. My findings showed limited support for the generational disconnect. Nearly all of the pregnant women I interviewed who were in contact with their mothers consulted them to assess issues related to pregnancy embodiment. Black and Latina women and white women with less than a college degree disregarded or even rejected the disconnect; they tended to frame their mothers’ advice as relevant. Their mothers attended prenatal care appointments and frequently expressed skepticism about medical directives. By contrast, I found that highly educated white women tended to endorse the generational disconnect when it came to matters related to pregnancy health behaviors – what to eat, how much to exercise – and their obstetric care. The mothers of these women not only largely supported the generational disconnect, but also bonded with their daughter over a shared appreciation for scientific understandings of pregnancy. Foregrounding women’s perspectives provides insights into meaning-making in pregnancy and the ways that mothers of pregnant women can both stymie and deepen medicalization of childbearing.

Longitudinally (2008–2012) assess whether community-level sociodemographic characteristics were associated with patient-centered medical home (PCMH) capacity among primary care and specialty physician practices, and the extent to which variation in PCMH capacity can be accounted for by sociodemographic characteristics of the community.

Linear growth curve models among 523 small and medium-sized physician practices that were members of a consortium of physician organizations pursuing the PCMH.

Our analysis indicated that the average level of sociodemographic characteristics was typically not associated with the level of PCMH capacity, but the heterogeneity of the surrounding community is generally associated with lower levels of capacity. Furthermore, these relationships differed for interpersonal and technical dimensions of the PCMH.

Our findings suggest that PCMH capabilities may not be evenly distributed across communities and raise questions about whether such distributional differences influence the PCMH’s ability to improve population health, especially the health of vulnerable populations. Such nuances highlight the challenges faced by practitioners and policy makers who advocate the continued expansion of the PCMH as a means of improving the health of local communities.

To date, most studies have focused cross-sectionally on practice characteristics and their association with PCMH adoption. Less understood is how physician practices’ PCMH adoption varies as a function of the sociodemographic characteristics of the community in which the practice is located, despite work that acknowledges the importance of social context in decisions about adoption and implementation that can affect the dissemination of innovations.

Chapter X of The Social System is often cited as the “charter” for the specialty field of medical sociology. A notable feature of its analysis is the argument that the physician is an agent of social control in relation to the patient. This argument grounds the application to medical practice of Parsons’ general conception that social control is an aspect of all social relationships. Parsons started by addressing the situation of a patient who assumes the sick role and then becomes the patient of a physician. The sick role involves a suspension of at least some of the performance expectations associated with a person's everyday social life, such as expectations of working productively at one's job, attending the meeting of a civic association, or caring for one's family members. But in assuming the sick role, an individual encounters new expectations that he or she should try to get well. For minor illnesses this may involve only resting, drinking fluids, and avoiding stress. For more serious illnesses, given our culture's valuation of scientific medicine, it typically involves placing oneself in the care of a physician. It then becomes the physician's duty to offer treatment and guidance to restore one's health and enable one to return to meet expectations of everyday roles. Thus the physician becomes an agent of social control.