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The nature and effects of stigma have been widely discussed in the context of mental illness, and references to stigma are commonly used to explain a wide array of social processes. For example, it is often claimed that stigmatisation affects aspects of personal identity, that it underpins unjust and discriminatory behaviour, and that it is responsible for a reluctance among members of the lay public to disclose the presence of treatable psychiatric symptoms and problems to health professionals. A widespread reluctance to disclose symptoms of `emotional problems' to health professionals is in fact well documented. Yet the reasons for such patterns of behaviour are far from clear. However, in this paper, on the basis of qualitative data collected from primary care attendees in Wales (N = 127), the authors suggest that appeals to stigma are inadequate to explain the phenomenon. More likely, it seems, is that members of the lay public have markedly different images from health professionals of what constitutes a mild to moderate psychiatric problem. Consequently, it is argued that the phenomenon of non-disclosure could be viewed more accurately as a problem of alternative taxonomic systems than of fear of stigma. The implications of the argument for health practice and theory are outlined. Keywords: Culture; Depression; Stigma; Primary care; Wales

This article discusses rationing practices in cancer genetics. The author, examining a cancer genetics clinic, argues the allocation of scarce medical resources to needy patients is more than a managerial process, but based upon risk assessment which is arbitrarily defined in relation to economic, social, and political factors.

An examination is presented on health attitudes and behavior among members of Canton-Chinese neighborhoods in England, focusing on mind and body correlations and spiritual agency within Asian culture. Subjects used by Chinese patients to communicate their health status include traditional medicine, demons, spirits, weather and food.

The movement away from hospital-based schemes of care for those with a psychiatric disability in favour of community-based schemes of care constitutes a turning point in the history of psychiatric provision in most Western European societies. The origins and rationale of this movement have sometimes been explained by reference to extra-discursive (economic) interests, and sometimes by reference to a form of technological or scientific determinism in which the discovery of such things as the neuroleptic drugs during the 1950s is said to have played a major role. This paper argues that the impetus for community as against hospital-based care can only be understood in terms of a changing discourse of psychiatry and psychiatric nursing, and especially those forms of thought which have tended to place 'illness' in the wings and set its primary sights on behavioural and social 'deficits'. There is a sense, therefore, in which hospital-based practices of psychiatrists and nurses have constituted the source and origin of their own transformation--a transformation in which the rationale of the psychiatric hospital has been eroded. The arguments in this paper are substantiated by reference to a current study of the forms of knowledge and daily practice which are drawn upon by nurses and psychiatrists in the psychiatric wards of a large Northern Irish hospital. Key words--psychiatry, de-institutionalisation, hospital, community

The progression of lay perspectives of health and illness are traced, extent of lay expertise; and contribution of lay people toward customer-sensitive health care system is re-examined. Data generated from three different projects related to Alzheimer's disease, traumatic brain injury and rejection of vaccination by older patients, is utilized.

This paper focuses on lay and professional ideas about the nature of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), and in particular, the ways in which understandings of the disorder are developed in a clinical setting. Our data are drawn from observations of consultations between sufferers and physicians in a UK medical out-patients clinic. We treat the clinic as a political field. That is to say, as an arena in which `problems' (about the management of illness) are constituted, and alternative approaches and solutions to such problems are pressed. We note that in the realms of symptoms, aetiology and treatment evaluation, lay people in the CFS clinic have quite distinct ideas about what their problems are and how they might be analysed and managed -- ideas that are often in conflict with those of medical professionals. Thus, lay sufferers, for example, operate within a different conceptual terrain from that of many professional experts. They are more likely to refer to a disease (myalgic encephalomyelitis or ME), rather than a syndrome. They call upon different kinds of hypotheses to explain their symptoms. They hold to conflicting ideas about the order of causal sequences, and they give emphasis to different kinds of phenomena in their accounts of illness. As a consequence, clinical consultations can often take on the form of a political contest between physician and patient to define the true and real nature of the patient's disorder -- a micro political struggle in which neurological symptoms can be re-framed as psychiatric symptoms, and psychiatric symptoms as neurological. In short, a contest in which the demarcation lines between mind and body are continually assessed and re-defined, and the tenets of `biomedicine' are constantly challenged. Keywords: Disease; Lay beliefs; Chronic fatigue syndrome; ME; Doctor-patient interaction