Socio-economic class, classification of 'abnormal' behaviour and perceptions of mental health care: a cross-cultural comparison.

This paper is a replication of a study in which we argue that class differences pertain not only to rates of mental illness but also to the recognition of symptoms of mental illness and to recommendations concerning what should be done by those exhibiting 'disordered behaviour'. Our previous findings from a sample of two small West Texas communities indicated that class differences did hold for both recognition of an recommendations fo9r help regarding behaviours which are commonly considered as 'disordered' by professional mental health personnel. We concluded that these differences were related to conditions of lower-class life, particularly a sense of powerlessness. In this paper we hypothesize that in societies where the two classes share high powerlessness, the differences in response to disordered behaviour will be less pronounced. To test this thesis, we obtained data from lower- and middle-class samples in Durango, Mexico, where both classes have been found to possess a high degree of powerlessness compared with the American sample. Findings lend support to our hypothesis.