Discovering the Social World of Mental Illness: A Review of the Nature of Mental Illness and Emphasis on its Linguistic Structure

Cultural psychology is a new discipline covering a universalistic intercultural version derived from a specific historical and cultural discourse. Since Kleinman’s major revision (1988), cultural psychopathology has been reconsidered with the aim of updating the previous reviews, assessment of conceptualizations and current methods, recognition of index trends, conceptual progressions, particularly changes in the definition of culture, studying both specific and common culture trends, the role of culture in psychiatric diagnosis for DSM-V and the World Health Organization report. In the new version, some cases of diseases such as depression and schizophrenia are included. The present research aims to show that mental illness is of a linguistic structure and study the illness as a cultural issue. The method applied in this research was that of discourse analysis. Discourse analysis, as a method of qualitative research, analyzes language and speech. The module of discourse analysis is narrative. A narrative is a cultural text, or scientific theory or social act. In discourse analysis, the researcher tries to recognize the underlying narratives of discourses through analyzing language and speech as well as interpreting approaches and theories. Studying discourse patterns created during usage of discursive resources, the analyst aims to identify the sources of similarities and differences. In recent years, research on cultural psychopathology has turned to an important area of study. The most important issue in cultural psychology and cultural psychopathology is to become aware of the definition of culture as specific discourse, and its role in in defining, clarifying and specifying mental illnesses. Cultural psychopathology focuses on language and the social global structure of language. It is in the light of language that we can reach to an integrated conceptualization of mental illness as a social and cultural construct. The ultimate goal of cultural psychopathology is to reduce pain and to improve people’s lives. Our modified definition of culture led to an analysis of signs and resources of cultural psychopathology in various levels of individual, family, society, and the expanded social system ones, which are all required for reaching this aim. Furthermore, culture is considered as a dynamic, variable and discursive process that is formed by role-playing of language in the social construct.