Family Neurosis and Family Psychosis

Abstract

Social medicine seeks to discover and tries to remedy pathogenic influences arising from poor housing, poverty, and occupational hazards. Similarly, social psychiatry has shown much concern with the prevalence and incidence of mental disorders in different socio-economic classes, in urban as against rural surroundings, and especially in conditions of relative social isolation or integration, which have often been found to be linked with certain areas of towns and cities. The limitations of this ecological approach have been summarized by Clausen and Kohn (1954). They were highly critical of many of the assumptions made by ecological workers, and they felt that their approach was too coarsegrained. The units studied were too big, and they suggested that a study of family relations and of more intimate interpersonal interactions would be more rewarding and more likely to shed some light on the social aspects of mental ill-health. They might have added that it would also be much more difficult.