TY - BOOK ID - 77897878 TI - Narrating Social Order PY - 2007 SN - 1442684658 9781442684652 9780802090881 0802090885 0802085571 PB - Toronto DB - UniCat KW - Agoraphobia. KW - Mental illness KW - Social psychiatry. KW - Agoraphobie. KW - Maladies mentales KW - Psychiatrie sociale. KW - Psychiatry, Social KW - Clinical sociology KW - Mental health KW - Psychiatry KW - Social medicine KW - Social psychology KW - Psychology, Pathological KW - Nosology KW - Fear of being alone KW - Fear of open space KW - Fear of open spaces KW - Isolation, Fear of KW - Open space, Fear of KW - Open spaces, Fear of KW - Panic disorders KW - Phobias KW - Spatial behavior KW - Classification. KW - Agoraphobie KW - Psychiatrie sociale KW - Classification UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77897878 AB - Agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, has received minimal attention from sociologists. Yet implicit within psychiatric discussion of this disease is a normative account of society, social order, social ordering, and power relations, making agoraphobia an excellent candidate for sociological interpretation. Narrating Social Order provides the first critical sociological framework for understanding agoraphobia, as well as the issue of psychiatric classification more generally.Shelley Z. Reuter explores three major themes in her analysis: agoraphobia in the context of gender, race, and class; the shift in recent decades from an emphasis on psychoanalytic explanations for mental diseases to an emphasis on strictly biogenic explanations; and, finally, embodiment as a process that occurs in and through disease categories. Reuter provides a close reading of reports of agoraphobia beginning with the first official cases, along with the DSM and its precursors, illustrating how a ?psychiatric narrative? is contained within this clinical discourse. She argues that, while the disease embodies very real physiological and emotional experiences of suffering, implicit in this fluid and shifting discourse are socio-cultural assumptions. These assumptions, and especially the question of what it means, both medically and culturally, to be ?normal? and ?pathological,? demonstrate the overlap between the psychiatric narrative of agoraphobia and socio-cultural narratives of exclusion. Ultimately, Reuter seeks to confront the gap that exists between sociological and psychiatric conceptions of mental disease and to understand the relationship between biomedical and cultural knowledges. ER -