Peter Prevos 17 May Updated 13 November words 11 minutes. Our concept of self and identity are highly dependent on our surroundings. Our identity is inherently social in that others are involved in its construction.
Our social identity, the way Primxry identify ourselves with the social groups we are a part of, is managed through careful impression management to try to have some influence on the way this identity is constructed. Because social identity is directly related to how others perceive somebody, deviance will have an impact on identity.
Primary Deviance And Secondary Deviance
Because of the wide range of possible Deviancw behaviours, almost every behaviour could be labelled as deviant, depending on the context in which it is defined. One particular type of deviance that can have significant effects on identity is a behaviour associated with a mental disorder. The influence that deviant behaviour has on identity formation will be discussed in this paper, with particular focus on behaviour related to mental illness. It will be argued that changed societal attitudes towards mental disorders in the last three decades have mitigated the effect on identity formation.
Mental disorder is a fuzzy concept which is impossible to define in discrete terms. In psychology, the terms Prumary and syndrome define mental disorder, analogous to the way physical diseases are classified. The only difference between the way mental and physical conditions are defined are the types of symptoms. A syndrome is a collection of interrelated symptoms in an individual and is considered a mental illness only if it causes a significant detriment to the person or their surroundings, it has an internal source and manifests itself involuntary. The dominant classification scheme for mental disorders in contemporary psychology is the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSMpublished by the American Psychiatric Association. go here
Sociological Theories For Deviance Fall Under The Concept Of Primary Deviance
The first edition of the DSM was developed in to increase the level of objectivity in the diagnoses of mental disorder. Subsequent versions of the DSM were designed to increase the consistency of diagnoses undertaken by different diagnosticians. This increased consistency resulted, however, is a loss of validity. The question that needs to be asked is whether the categories in the DSM are actual disorders or whether they are socially constructed.]
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