Papers by Bernice Pescosolido
Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, Apr 17, 2023
Purpose The persistent gap between population indicators of poor mental health and the uptake of ... more Purpose The persistent gap between population indicators of poor mental health and the uptake of services raises questions about similarities and differences between social and medical/psychiatric constructions. Rarely do studies have assessments from different perspectives to examine whether and how lay individuals and professionals diverge. Methods Data from the Person-to-Person Health Interview Study (P2P), a representative U.S. state sample (N ~ 2700) are used to examine the overlap and correlates of three diverse perspectives-self-reported mental health, a self/other problem recognition, and the CAT-MH™ a validated, computer adaptive test for psychopathology screening. Descriptive and multinominal logit analyses compare the presence of mental health problems across stakeholders and their association with respondents' sociodemographic characteristics. Results Analyses reveal a set of socially constructed patterns. Two convergent patterns indicate whether there is (6.9%, The "Sick") or is not (64.6%, The "Well") a problem. The "Unmet Needers" (8.7%) indicates that neither respondents nor those around them recognize a problem identified by the screener. Two patterns indicate clinical need where either respondents (The "Self Deniers", 2.9%) or others (The "Network Deniers", 6.0%) do not. Patterns where the diagnostic indicator does not suggest a problem include The "Worried Well" (4.9%) where only the respondent does, The "Network Coerced" (4.6%) where only others do, and The "Prodromal" (1.4%) where both self and others do. Education, gender, race, and age are associated with social constructions of mental health problems. Conclusions The implications of these results hold the potential to improve our understanding of unmet need, mental health literacy, stigma, and treatment resistance.
Contemporary Sociology, 1985
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Frontiers in Psychology, 2021
The past 20 years have seen dramatic rises in suicide rates in the United States and other countr... more The past 20 years have seen dramatic rises in suicide rates in the United States and other countries around the world. These trends have been identified as a public health crisis in urgent need of new solutions and have spurred significant research efforts to improve our understanding of suicide and strategies to prevent it. Unfortunately, despite making significant contributions to the founding of suicidology – through Emile Durkheim’s classic Suicide (1897/1951) – sociology’s role has been less prominent in contemporary efforts to address these tragic trends, though as we will show, sociological theories offer great promise for advancing our understanding of suicide and improving the efficacy of suicide prevention. Here, we review sociological theory and empirical research on suicide. We begin where all sociologists must: with Durkheim. However, we offer a more comprehensive understanding of Durkheim’s insights into suicide than the prior reviews provided by those in other discipl...
The Palgrave Handbook of American Mental Health Policy, 2019
Stigma, as a word and concept, is in common use by the public, by professionals, researchers, con... more Stigma, as a word and concept, is in common use by the public, by professionals, researchers, consumers, and policy makers. While there is a sense that all of these groups are talking vaguely about the same social phenomenon, it turns out that the contemporary usage of the word is quite varied, even controversial to some. For example, some researchers use "stigma" because it resonates with the key groups listed above and it clearly names prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behaviors as the targets for change [1]. Others, however, believe that using the term gives it power to do damage, define discrimination apart from stigma, and see its use as deflecting away from discrimination, the real target for change [2, 3]. Ironically, the term "stigma" has come in and out of fashion for different academic disciplines, advocacy groups and officials at different points in time [4]. While social scientists have found the term's origin in ancient Greece as a "mark" to distinguish conquered slaves from freemen [5, 6], its predominant use in American science has been to refer to illness or other conditions (for example, non-parity), or statuses (for example, race) that are stereotyped as morally or physically contagious, dangerous, unpredictable, and often deadly. This may be due, in part, to the influential work of Erving 19
Annual Review of Sociology, Aug 11, 2011
Since Durkheim's classic work on suicide, sociological attention to understanding the roots o... more Since Durkheim's classic work on suicide, sociological attention to understanding the roots of self-destruction has been inconsistent. In this review, we use three historical periods of interest (pre-Durkheim, Durkheim, post-Durkheim) to organize basic findings in the body of sociological knowledge regarding suicide. Much of the twentieth-century research focused on issues of integration and regulation, imitation, and the social construction of suicide rates. Innovations in the twenty-first-century resurgence of sociological research on suicide are described in detail. These newer studies begin to redirect theory and analysis toward a focus on ethnoracial subgroups, individual-level phenomena (e.g., ideation), and age-period-cohort effects. Our analysis of sociology's contributions, limits, and possibilities leads to a recognition of the need to break through bifurcations in individual- and aggregate-level studies, to pursue the translation of Durkheim's original theory into a network perspective as one avenue of guiding micro-macro research, and to attend to the complexity in both multidisciplinary explanations and pragmatic interventions.
Addiction, 2020
Background and AimsOur ability to combat the opioid epidemic depends, in part, on dismantling the... more Background and AimsOur ability to combat the opioid epidemic depends, in part, on dismantling the stigma that surrounds drug use. However, this epidemic has been unique and, to date, we have not understood the nature of public prejudices associated with it. Here, we examine the nature and magnitude of public stigma toward prescription opioid use disorder (OUD) using the only nationally representative data available on this topic.DesignGeneral Social Survey (GSS), a cross‐sectional, nationally representative survey of public attitudes.SettingUnited States, 2018.Participants/CasesA total of 1169 US residents recruited using a probability sample.MeasurementsRespondents completed a vignette‐based survey experiment to assess public stigma toward people who develop OUD following prescription of opioid analgesics. This condition is compared with depression, schizophrenia, alcohol use disorder (AUD) and subclinical distress using multivariable logistic or linear regression.FindingsAdjusting...
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Papers by Bernice Pescosolido