In incorporating social process into a model of the dynamics of mental disorders, Being Mentally Ill questions the individualistic model favored in current psychiatric and psychoanalytic theory. While the conventional psychiatric viewpoint seeks the causes of mental illness, Scheff views "the symptoms of mental illness" as the violation of residual rules—social norms so taken for granted that they are not explicitly verbalized. Throughout the book, the sociological model of mental illness is compared and contrasted with more conventional medical and psychological models in an attempt to delineate significant problems for further analysis and research.
The third edition has been revised and expanded to encompass the considerable controversy prompted by the first edition and sustained in the second, and also to evaluate recent developments in the field. New to this edition are discussions of the massive use of psychoactive drugs in the treatment of mental illness, changing mental health laws, new social science and psychiatric studies, and the controversy surrounding the labeling theory of mental illness itself.
