Dimensions of Folk Psychiatry

Abstract

This article presents a social-cognitive model of laypeople's thinking about mental disorder, dubbed “folk psychiatry.” The author proposes that there are 4 dimensions along which laypeople conceptualize mental disorders and that these dimensions have distinct cognitive underpinnings. Pathologizing represents the judgment that a form of behavior or experience is abnormal or deviant and reflects availability and simulation heuristics, internal attribution, and reification. Moralizing—the judgment that individuals are morally accountable for their abnormality—reflects a form of intentional explanation grounded in everyday folk psychology. Medicalizing represents the judgment that abnormality has a somatic basis and reflects an essentialist mode of thinking. Psychologizing—ascribing abnormality to psychological dysfunction—reflects an emergent form of mentalistic explanation that is neither essentialist nor intentional. Implications for psychiatric stigma and for cross-cultural variations in understandings of the psychiatric domain are discussed.