The Origins of Common Mental Disorders describes the nature, characteristics and causes of the common emotional and behavioural disorders across the lifespan, providing a clear and concise account of recent advances in the field.

An important and unique survey of the historical background to the descriptive categories of psychopathology.

"Madness" is, of course, personally experienced, but because of its intimate relationship to the sociocultural context, it is also socially constructed, culturally represented and socially controlled--all of which make it a topic rife for sociological analysis. Using a range of historical and contemporary textual material, this work exercises the sociological imagination to explore some of the most perplexing questions in the history of madness, including why some behaviors, thoughts and emotions are labeled mad while others are not; why they are labeled mad in one historical period and not another; why the label of mad is applied to some types of people and not others; by whom the label is applied, and with what consequences.

Discusses the classification process for mental illness, examing the difficulty that practioners have of separating normal reactions to everyday stresses from true mental disorders, which involve recurring patterns of symptoms and behaviors.