ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights how, influenced by a range of conflicting ideologies, from medical naturalism to social constructionism, different professional groups adjudicate on the field of mental wellbeing with fundamental disagreement about thresholds and eligibility for support, dismissing historical and structural mechanisms. For example, historically the biomedical model of inheritance and determinism in relation to ‘mental deficiency’ encouraged the belief that some individuals were biologically degenerate without hope of reform. Social constructionism, on the other hand, argues that our understanding of the world is produced in interaction, through social processes that are socio-historically contingent, without acknowledging that some problems, e.g. unemployment, stem from material and institutional conditions. The analytical framework adopted in this book draws on critical realism, a metatheory that uses elements from both social constructionist and biomedical models. This chapter sheds light on (conflicting) ideologies that are currently adopted in research with a focus on mental illness and safeguarding, and introduces critical realist ontology as providing a useful interface and way forward here.
