Sociology of Health and Illness

This chapter explains how we socially define health and illness. Using comedic examples alongside historical evolutions of medical classifications, this chapter showcases how the definition of illness evolves, how society stigmatizes illness, and how individuals engage in impression management when dealing with ill health. This chapter uses examples from movies and television to show how mental health is discussed in comedy and analyzes the veracity of the sad clown paradox – a purported phenomenon in which people assume comedians are deeply depressed people – using a sociological approach. This chapter draws on the contributions of symbolic interactionism, gender as performance, stigma visibility, feminist theory, postmodernism and Jean Baudrillard, critical theory, and Erving Goffman. Concepts include medicalization, constructionist theories of deviance, interactionism, labeling theory, network burden, falseness, repressiveness, and invisible disabilities. This chapter returns to sociological explanations of deviance to discuss illness and its social consequences. From there, the chapter delves into a discussion on performed authenticity as it relates to mental health.