Abstract
In recent years, there have been huge changes in psychiatric knowledge and psychiatric treatment. One is the shift from hospital care to community care. Another is the transformation of how mental health care participants interact with psychiatric knowledge. This paper attempts to trace the development of a sociological perspective on mental health using the question of how a sociological perspective can describe psychiatric treatment and it's knowledge. In this paper, I discuss the development in the following three stages. The first stage is anti-psychiatry and the labeling theory that supported this. The second stage is the narrative approach and social constructionism. The third stage involves the assessment and rehabilitation of those who have mental disorders and their families. These have had a great influence on psychiatric practice in recent years. This presents a sociological perspective for describing the relations among such knowledge shifts by presenting the idea of ethnomethodology as a viewpoint that brings a different understanding from that provided by labeling theory and social constructionism.
