ABSTRACT
This paper analyzes an interview which tells how K comes to be defined by her friends as mentally ill. It is not just a record of events as they happened, but of events as they were seen as relevant to reaching a decision about the character of those events. This is a common feature of the kinds of records etc. with which the social scientist in the field of deviant behavior is concerned. The various agencies of social control have institutionalized procedures for assembling, processing, and testing information about the behavior of individuals so that it can be matched against the paradigms which provide the working criteria of class-membership whether as juvenile delinquent, mentally ill, or the like. These procedures, both formal and informal, are a regular part of the business of the police, the courts, psychiatrists, and other similar agencies (Cicourel 1969). A full description of the organizational practice of such agencies in these respects would be a description of one type of procedure by which a set of original and actual events is transformed into the currency of fact. A number of studies in the field of mental illness (Goffman 1961a; Scheff 1964; Mechanic 1962; Smith 1975), show that descriptions of the activities of the official agencies are far from adequate in accounting for how people come to be defined as mentally ill. In this account it is K’s friends who are doing the preliminary work. K does not get so far as the formal psychiatric agencies though this is foreshadowed. Accounts of ‘paths to the mental hospital’ (Clausen and Yarrow 1955) suggest that a good deal of non-formal work has been done by the individual concerned, her family, and friends, before entry to the official process. These non-formal processes may also be described as a social organization which in this case precedes the production of an interview account of the kind I am concerned with here.
