Brown P
Department of Sociology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA.
J Health Soc Behav. 1995;Spec No:34-52.
This paper examines the social construction of diagnosis and illness in several ways. First, I discuss the centrality of social construction in medical sociology. Next I discuss the major role of diagnosis in social construction, leading to the need for a sociology of diagnosis. I emphasize controversial and conflictual diagnoses, as a first step toward a more general sociology of diagnosis. Then I put forth a typology of social construction, involving four combinations based on whether a condition is generally accepted and whether a biomedical definition is applied. Next I detail a series of stages in the social construction of a condition. In that process, my primary concern is the initial social discovery, which is essentially a matter of diagnosis, with a secondary emphasis on illness experience. This is followed by stages of treatment and outcome, which recursively affect social construction. I conclude by noting the health policy implications of the social constructionist perspective.
本文从多个方面探讨了诊断与疾病的社会建构。首先，我讨论了社会建构在医学社会学中的核心地位。接下来，我论述了诊断在社会建构中的主要作用，进而引出对诊断社会学的需求。我强调有争议和冲突性的诊断，这是迈向更广义诊断社会学的第一步。然后，我提出了一种社会建构的类型学，它基于一种状况是否被普遍接受以及是否应用生物医学定义，包含四种组合。接下来，我详细阐述了一种状况社会建构的一系列阶段。在这个过程中，我主要关注最初的社会发现，这本质上是一个诊断问题，其次关注疾病体验。随后是治疗和结果阶段，它们会递归地影响社会建构。最后，我指出了社会建构主义视角对健康政策的影响。
