Social Problems and Mental Health

Jessica Kuper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000536812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

First published in 1987, Social Problems and Mental Health presents a sophisticated response to the whole question of what constitutes a social problem, with nearly fifty entries giving a range of perspectives on the main problem issues of our age. Also included are useful suggestions for further reading. Entries cover areas of concern connected with physical and mental health, poverty, crime and violence, family and social relationships, sexuality and so on. The book provides succinct descriptions of various areas of concern with historical backgrounds. Both casual readers and students of sociology and psychology will find the book useful.

Abortion

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261919-1

The definition of induced abortion has been complicated by a debate about when ‘life’ can be said to begin. Frequently, however, it is defined as the intentional termination of pregnancy prior to the time at which the foetus attains viability, or capacity for life outside the womb. Cross-cultural evidence indicates that induced abortion is a universal practice (Devereux, 1955). Abortion, as a factor affecting fertility levels, has always interested demographers. The laws governing abortion at various times have reflected governmental population policies – for example, restrictions during the 1930s in the Soviet Union; encouragement of abortion in post-World War II Japan. Prior to the mid-1950s, Western social scientists other than demographers devoted little attention to the problem of abortion, although philosophers and theologians often discussed its moral implications.

Medically, the early termination of pregnancy by a trained physician under proper conditions is in most cases a simple and safe procedure. The legal status of this practice, however, has varied greatly by time and place. Since the beginning of the 1960s, the two major factors heightening social science interest in abortion are (1) concern for the possibly adverse social consequences of restrictive abortion laws; and (2) the growth and influence of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Numerous studies (see Schur, 1965) have demonstrated that legal proscription does not significantly deter women from terminating unwanted pregnancies, but merely drives the demand for abortion underground, supporting an illicit market. Abortion seekers are then subject to economic and other exploitation by unscrupulous operators. The illegal operations themselves (and the attempts at self-induced abortion that typically precede them) often carry a high risk of physical as well as psychological harm.

Increasingly, abortion is recognized as a pre-eminent issue for feminists. Restrictive policies are seen to control female sexuality, impose undesired maternity, and impair women’s rights to bodily self-determination. Furthermore, as Simone de Beauvoir (1953) has emphasized, abortion policies – the effects of which are felt almost entirely by women – have invariably been enacted and implemented by men (be they legislators or medical practitioners). Feminist political activity on behalf of women’s reproductive rights has had a world-wide impact on public policy since the 1960s. Some of the most dramatic developments have occurred in the United States where a process of gradual legal liberalization led to a major US Supreme Court ruling (Roe v. Wade, 1973) legalizing abortion in the early months of pregnancy. Since that decision, there has been a sharp crystallization of‘pro-choice’ (anti-restriction) and ‘right to life’ (pro-restriction) advocates – the latter including, but by no means limited to, Roman Catholic opponents. These groups have been actively engaged in collective organization and political action aimed at influencing public policy. Thus, in America and elsewhere the question of abortion has led to a clash of large-scale social and political movements, while the issue has continued to generate debate on a more abstract philosophical level.

Edwin M. Schur
New York University

References

• Beauvoir, S. de (1953), The Second Sex, New York.
• Devereux, G. (1955), A Study of Abortion in Primitive Societies, New York.
• Schur, E. (1965), Crimes Without Victims, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.

Further Reading

• Cohen, M., Nagel, T. and Scanlon, T. (eds) (1974), The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion, Princeton.
• Jaffe, F., Lindheim, B. and Lee, P. (1981), Abortion Politics: Private Morality and Public Policy, New York.
• Luker, K. (1975), Taking Chances: Abortion and the Decision Not to Contracept, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Adoption

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261919-2

Adoption as an institutionalized procedure for changing a child’s status has a very long, broken history. ‘The ancient law books of Rome, India and Mesopotamia are full of statutes and commentaries on the subject’ (Goody, 1983). Yet the first British law on adoption was only passed in 1926, after the Tomlin Report had given a cautious welcome to the idea. The ensuing years have seen an intensification of public interest in adoption, evidenced by committees of enquiry in 1954 (Hurst) and 1972 (Houghton), and by legislative changes in 1950, 1958 and 1975. During this period there have been substantial changes in the concept of adoption and in its social treatment. What was regarded in the 1920s and 1930s as a wholly unquestionable benefit for otherwise unfortunate children, bestowed through the agency of voluntary religious bodies, is now regarded less confidently and more critically in the light of changing beliefs and social forms, particularly the family.

In ancient times adoption was treated primarily as an approved method of solving heirship problems. In the present century adoption re-emerged as a provision that both benefited children and enabled couples to solve social and psychological problems consequent on their childlessness. Adoption came to be seen as a socially sanctioned, but secret, way of transferring babies from unmarried mothers to ‘normal’ households. The valued secrecy hid the fact of ‘deviant’ birth and the process of transition. Legally, the irreversible act of adoption secured definitions that emphasized the status of the child ‘as if’ it had been born to the adoptive parents and social arrangements underlined this.

Childless couples and others may nowadays object to any closely drawn distinction between the purposes of adoption as serving exclusively the needs either of adults or of children. Yet adoption today is viewed increasingly as part of provision for children; their interests are treated as paramount. One illustration of this is the significant decline in the use of the adoption order in the reconstitution of families following divorce or when single mothers married for the first time. In 1974 such step-parents accounted in Great Britain for some 60 per cent (15,000) of total adoptions, but by 1982 the figure had fallen to under 6,000: the guardianship, originally proposed in the Houghton Report, became a more acceptable solution, and the Houghton arguments revolved around possible negative effects on the child of ‘automatic’ step-parent adoption. Another illustration of the change in orientation of the service is the growing emphasis on the adoption of children rather than infants, and on children previously considered unsuitable for adoption. In this category are to be found the physically and the mentally handicapped, black infants and black children, older children and sibling groups. As such children became a focus for adoption services, so criteria of appropriate adopters changed.

The adoption of older children in itself would make it more difficult to maintain any social fiction of the adoptee ‘as if born’ to the adopting parents. Other developments also encouraged the greater social visibility of adoption as such. In the 1960s a growing appreciation of the special tasks and problems of adoptive parents led to a definition of the adopting parent role as different from that of the birth parents. As people began to recognize that adoptees faced problems — this was signalled in a general but probably misleading way by a series of studies of child guidance clinic populations — support grew for the desirability of post-adoption services. By contrast, within a closed, unacknowledged view of adoption such provision is inconceivable: services are not provided simply on the basis of parenthood or childhood, so how could they be justified simply because the situation was one of adoption? Finally, as people acknowledge that ‘hard to place’ children have particular needs, this has led for the first time to the consideration and use of financial allowances. Symbolically, the sanctioned use of money in arrangements for adoption marks a radical change. Earlier legislation was concerned to remove any notion of financial consideration.

Questions of identity in relation to adoption have also led to legislative change and to a growing controversy concerning a particular range of adoptions, those described as transracial. Professional wisdom soon came to question the desirability of any attempt to conceal from a child his or her adoptive status, but this early stance has been elaborated. The fact of a particular status means little unless over a period of time one is given opportunities to exchange ideas about how the status came about, to give and to receive accounts of the past and one’s own part in it. ‘Telling’ comes to be seen not as a once-for-all event; it is more a process of disclosure resulting from interaction with significant others. This kind of elaboration has been accompanied by a hesitantly accepted conviction that some minimum birth information was a matter of the adopted person’s rights. Such a right was enacted in Britain in S. 26 of the Children Act, 1975, though access to birth records could not be obtained without a counselling session. Similar rights have been enacted in other countries.

The adoption of black children by white couples was initially regarded as a welcome response to disadvantage and a way of preparing the future citizens of a racially integrated society. However, earlier research on the positive results of such adoptions has been succeeded by studies which raise more questions. Perhaps the most serious criticism of transracial adoption arises from recent arguments concerning a black child’s right to what is called a black identity.

Noel Timms
University of Leicester

Further Reading

• Bean, P. (ed.) (1984), Adoption: Essays in Social Policy, Law and Sociology, London.
• Goody, J. (1983), The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, Cambridge.
• Haimes, E. and Timms, N. (1985), Adoption, Identity and Social Policy, London.

Ageing – Psychological Aspects

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261919-3

The study of age-related changes in cognitive processes has received fresh impetus as the proportion of elderly people in the population of Western societies continues to increase. It is important that these changes should be recognized, understood and taken into account so as to enable the elderly to cope with a modern environment and continue living a full life of work and leisure activities.

The researcher tries to isolate and identify the effects of normal ageing on cognitive abilities. Changes caused by the ageing process are confounded with associated changes in physical health, in life-style, in motivation and personality. Poor performance may be the product of sensory deficits, anxiety or lack of interest rather than mental deterioration. When old and young are compared, tests may be contaminated by cohort effects. Just as intelligence tests may be criticized for not being ‘culture-fair’, they can also be criticized for not being ‘cohort-fair’. The educational and life experience of the generations are different and have shaped different sorts of ability. Experimental research on ageing seeks to disentangle these confounding variables and focus on the effects of age alone.

Many mental abilities do show some deterioration with age, but others are unimpaired. Individual differences tend to increase, with some individuals deteriorating while others preserve their intellect intact. In general, little decline is observable able before the mid-1960s. Traditional psychometric testing has yielded age norms for performance on batteries of standard intelligence tests. The results led to a distinction between ‘crystallized’ (or age invariant) intelligence and ‘fluid’ (age sensitive) intelligence. Tests which measure intellectual attainment, such as vocabulary, verbal ability and factual knowledge, show little age effect. Tests measuring ability to manipulate or transform information such as backward digit span, or digit-symbol substitution and some tests of spatial reasoning, generally reveal a decline. These tests, however, give little insight into the changes in the underlying mechanisms that cause some abilities to be impaired and others to be preserved.

Psychologists turned, therefore, to the experimental techniques developed in the study of perception, attention, learning and memory, and applied these to the problem of ageing. The information processing approach allows complex tasks to be decomposed so that the defective component can be identified. So, for example, experimental studies of memory indicate that the process of retrieval is relatively more affected by ageing than encoding or storage (Burke and Light, 1981); and studies of mental arithmetic show that the capacity of working memory, the ‘holding store’, is the vulnerable component (Wright, 1981). Common factors such as a diminished rate of information processing and a diminished capacity of working memory are seen to underlie performance decrements on many tasks. The pattern of deficit can be interpreted in terms of theoretical distinctions, like that between attentional processes (ones that require conscious monitoring) and automatic processes (ones that are highly practised, rapid and unconscious). Attentional processes are more likely to be age-impaired, while automatic processes are often unaffected.

One problem that arises when complex tasks are studied is that of distinguishing between age differences in strategy and in capacity. Defective performance may result from failure to employ the right strategy rather than from reduced capacity. Where strategies are implicated, the age difference may be eliminated by remedial training. When a capacity limitation is the cause, the age difference can only be removed by restructuring the task so as to make it less demanding. The current trend in ageing research is to study performance in real-world situations with emphasis on the practical and applied aspects. For this more applied approach it is clearly very important to discover how far the difficulties old people experience...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Contributor List
• Social Problems
• Social Problems and Mental Health: the entries