Does society still matter? Mental health and illness in the 21.th century

The chapters in the final section of the book move us back again from the
particular towards the general level of sociological analysis and diagnosis by
building bridges linking the subtle and diffuse ways in which micro-processes
and molecular biopower map onto processes at the most general level of social
transformation and civilizational change.
Pia Ringø’s Chapter 9, ‘Does Society Still Matter? Mental Health and Illness
and the Social Sciences in the Twenty-first Century’, examines the ways in which
the scientific character of psychiatry and the managerial-technological principle
that scientific methods that identify truth with certain ways of acquiring knowledge can produce more effective treatment measures, tends to abandon the fundamental problems of psychiatry. The complexities of emotional life and the existential and moral problems of what it means to be a healthy human being are increasingly set aside and bypassed, instead trusting in the ability of science to determine ‘what works’ in psychiatric practice, reducing consideration of the healthy mind to primary individualistic biomedical and cognitive approaches.