Mental health care, other than being a critical medical service, is a centrally important cultural institution, shaping individuals’ understanding of their lives and problems. This dissertation consists of a multi-method investigation examining the U.S. mental health care field from these two intersecting perspectives.
To achieve this, it examines (1) how structural conditions determine different social groups’ access to different mental health care services; (2) what effects these disparities in access have on individuals’ experiences when seeking care and on the outcomes they face; (3) how the stratification of the mental health care field exposes different Americans to different sets of cultural scripts and understandings, generating correspondence between sociodemographics and intimately-held meanings and normative action scripts for mental well-being.
Its four chapters thus tackle mental health care’s social significance from multiple angles, using geospatial, computational text analysis, and audit methods, seeking to provide actionable, public health policy-relevant empirical research concerning inequalities in access to care, as well as to address key theoretical problems regarding the segregation of meaning-making with which sociology has long contended.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/nv6f-2j05 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Tadmon, Daniel |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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