Description
Book SynopsisThe importance of George Brown''s sustained contribution to medical sociology through his longitudinal studies of psychiatric disorder and its relationship to social context is widely recognised. This collection of seventeen chapters exemplifies a particular way of working as a medical sociologist which focuses on the understanding of the meaning of social experiences as the key to an individual''s health status. It combines the biographical richness of qualitative analysis and thus reach conclusions on the basis of statistical significance.
The contributors mainly focus on conditions of depression and anxiety, relating these to the meanings including both demographic aspects such as gender, parity, lifestyle, employment, refugee/immigration status, humiliation, entrapment, loss and also more interpersonal stresses such as neglect, abuse and critical or unsupportive relationships.
This is a book which offers a rich treasury of information for all researchers interested in under
Table of Contents1: Introduction to the work of George Brown; I: Social psychiatry and social science; 2: George W. Brown's contribution to psychiatry; 3: Bringing meaning back into social psychiatric research; 4: George W. Brown; II: Measurement of key psychosocial factors in research; 5: Lessons from using semistructured interviews with seriously ill patients; 6: Expressed emotion; 7: Contextual measures and subjective appraisal; III: Model building; 8: Negative life events and family negativity; 9: Towards a dynamic stress-vulnerability model of depression; 10: The timing of lives; 11: The childhood experience of care and abuse (CECA); 12: Gender differences in the experience and response to adversity; 13: The long-term effects of childhood adversities on depression and other psychiatric disorders; 14: Evolved socio-emotional systems and their role in depressive disorders; IV: Psychosocial factors in conditions other than depression; 15: Life stress and bipolar disorder; 16: The study of life events; V: Postscript; 17: Some thoughts on the future of social psychiatry
