Self-Conception, Social Class, and Mental Health

The research reported here is part of a large inquiry into the social and cultural correlatives of mental disease. The program of research is being conducted in a small, active treatment psychiatric hospital.1 This paper presents findings which relate social class position and psychiatric disorders. The existence of these relationships is clearly established in earlier reports which will be touched upon later, but awareness of their existence does not, of itself, throw any light on the nature of the nexus between social class position and psychiatric illness. This scientific situation seemed to us to invite the inquiry which this paper reports. We explored the usefulness of the self-conception, viewed from the symbolic interactionist frame of reference,2 as a construct for relating the subcultural variations which are known to exist in different social classes3 and class-linked differences in rates and kinds of psychiatric illness. In what follows, we base our statements about differences and similarities in self-conception on a device which we believe gets at the conception of self rather directly, and which yields results which can be analyzed in terms appropriate to the problem at hand.