Dimensions of folk psychiatry

Abstract

This article presents a social-cognitive model of lay people's thinking about mental disorder, dubbed "folk psychiatry." The author proposes that there are 4 dimensions along which laypeople conceptualize mental disorders and that these dimensions have distinct cognitive underpinnings. Pathologizing represents the judgment that a form of behavior or experience is abnormal or deviant and reflects availability and simulation heuristics, internal attribution, and relocation. Moralizing - the judgment that individuals are morally accountable for their abnormality - reflects a form of intentional explanation grounded in everyday folk psychology. Medicalizing represents the judgment that abnormali..