Medical Sociology

Abstract

Medical sociology is the study of how social structures, relationships, and meanings shape health, illness, and the institutions of medicine. For cognitive psychology its interest is sharper than the label suggests: it treats being ill as a matter of interpretation and role, showing that how a person conceives a symptom, categorizes a diagnosis, and reads the reactions of others governs what they feel and do. This article follows that cognitive thread through the sick role as a normative schema, the common-sense model of illness self-regulation, the medicalization of ordinary life, stigma as socially structured cognition, and the theory that social conditions are fundamental causes of the health gradient. It closes with help-seeking as reasoned action under real constraint. Three interactive demonstrations let the reader manipulate these ideas.

Keywords: medical sociology, illness cognition, the sick role, medicalization, health inequalities

Medical sociology is the branch of sociology that asks how social life enters into health and disease: how societies define who is sick, how the roles and institutions of medicine are organized, and how a person's position in the social order shapes both their exposure to illness and their experience of it. Its founding move was to treat illness not as a purely biological fact but as a social state with rights, obligations, and meanings attached, a state a person enters and is expected to leave in socially patterned ways (Parsons, 1951). For cognitive psychology the discipline is a natural interlocutor because so much of what it studies is representational: the beliefs a patient holds about a symptom, the category a diagnosis assigns them to, the stigma a condition carries, and the mental models by which people decide that something is wrong and that help is needed. What medical sociology adds to the psychology of these representations is the insistence that they are not free-floating cognitions but are structured by social position, institutions, and shared cultural schemas.

What Medical Sociology Is

Medical sociology is the systematic study of the social dimensions of health, illness, and medicine, and it works on two fronts that are easy to confuse. The sociology in medicine borrows sociological tools to answer questions medicine itself poses, such as why patients do not follow treatment; the sociology of medicine turns the same tools on medicine as an institution, asking how it defines disease, exercises authority, and distributes its benefits. Both rest on a founding observation: that disease, the biological disturbance, and illness, the lived and socially interpreted experience of being unwell, are not the same thing, and that a full account of sickness requires attention to the second as well as the first (Timmermans & Haas, 2008). A society decides which departures from function count as illness at all, who is entitled to the status, and what is owed to and by those who hold it. Because medicine is also one of the most powerful institutions of modern life, the discipline has paid close attention to its expanding jurisdiction, tracing how conditions once seen as moral, legal, or simply ordinary come under medical authority (Conrad, 1992). For the science of mind the payoff is a steady supply of cases in which a cognitive process, categorizing, explaining, deciding, is visibly shaped by social structure rather than unfolding in a social vacuum. Figure 1 lays out the cognitive thread this article follows, from the normative schema of the sick role through to the structural forces of fundamental cause theory.

The Sick Role

The concept that founded the field is the sick role, Talcott Parsons's analysis of illness as a socially regulated form of deviance. Being sick, on this account, is not merely a bodily condition but a temporary social status governed by a schema of two rights and two duties: the sick person is exempted from normal role obligations and is not held responsible for their condition, but in return is obliged to regard being sick as undesirable and to seek technically competent help and cooperate with it (Parsons, 1951). The arrangement is functional in Parsons's sense because unregulated withdrawal from duty would threaten the social order, so society channels it through a role that legitimates the exemption while binding the incumbent to the project of recovery. The physician, correspondingly, is granted the authority to certify entry into the role and to license exit from it. This is where the cognitive and the sociological meet: the sick role is a shared cultural schema, a set of expectations each party brings to the encounter, and much of the friction of clinical life arises when the schema is contested, as when a condition is chronic and offers no exit, or when a sufferer is suspected of malingering. Parsons's model was quickly criticized for fitting acute, curable illness far better than chronic disease or disability, and for taking the physician's authority for granted, but it opened the durable insight that medicine functions as an institution of social control, licensing some deviations and disciplining others (Zola, 1972).

Illness Cognition and the Common-Sense Model

If the sick role describes the social scaffolding of illness, the common-sense model describes what goes on inside the patient who occupies it. Developed by Howard Leventhal and colleagues, the model holds that a person facing a health threat does not passively receive medical information but actively constructs an illness representation, a structured mental model of the condition organized along a small number of recurring dimensions: its identity, the label and the symptoms taken to belong to it; its cause; its timeline, whether acute, chronic, or cyclical; its consequences; and its controllability by the self or by treatment (Leventhal, Phillips, & Burns, 2016). This representation, together with a parallel appraisal of the emotional threat, guides the coping procedures the person adopts, and the outcomes of those procedures feed back to revise the representation, making the whole a self-regulating loop rather than a one-shot judgment. The model's central and repeatedly confirmed claim is that behavior tracks the representation rather than the medical facts: a patient who believes a condition is short-lived will stop treatment when symptoms remit even if the underlying disease persists, a pattern that follows directly from a mismatch between a chronic disease and an acute timeline belief. A large meta-analysis of the model found that the representation dimensions cohere as predicted and relate systematically to coping and to outcomes such as adherence, though the links from coping to outcome are more variable than the theory's tidy diagram implies (Hagger, Koch, Chatzisarantis, & Orbell, 2017). The representation is not merely cognitive bookkeeping. For serious chronic illness it can amount to a rupture in the person's sense of who they are: sociological work describes chronic illness as a biographical disruption that breaks the taken-for-granted assumptions and life narrative on which identity rested (Bury, 1982), and as a loss of self in which the erosion of a valued self-image becomes a fundamental form of suffering distinct from the physical symptoms (Charmaz, 1983). The five dimensions along which the representation is organized are summarized in Table 1. The demonstration below lets the reader set an illness representation along its timeline, consequence, and control dimensions and watch the coping response and likely adherence shift, including the classic failure that follows when an acute timeline belief is applied to a chronic disease.

Medicalization

One of medical sociology's most exported ideas is medicalization, the process by which problems not previously understood in medical terms come to be defined and treated as illnesses or disorders. Peter Conrad, its leading analyst, traced how a widening range of human conditions, from alcoholism and hyperactivity to shyness, sadness, and the ordinary difficulties of aging, have been brought under medical description and jurisdiction, and stressed that the crucial change is definitional: medicalization is achieved when a problem is cast in medical language and made the object of medical intervention, whether or not any new biological understanding warrants it (Conrad, 1992). The engines driving the process have shifted over time. Where the mid-century expansion was propelled largely by the medical profession's own claims to jurisdiction, the contemporary drivers are increasingly commercial and technological, with pharmaceutical marketing, biotechnology, and consumers themselves pressing for diagnoses and treatments, so that medicalization has become less a matter of professional dominance than of markets and lay demand (Conrad, 2005). A further transformation, labeled biomedicalization, describes how the technoscientific medicine of genomics, risk screening, and enhancement extends medical attention beyond the treatment of illness to the optimization and surveillance of bodies defined as merely at risk (Clarke, Shim, Mamo, Fosket, & Fishman, 2003). The cognitive stakes are direct: medicalization is at bottom a matter of categorization, of where a society draws the boundary of the medical, and moving that boundary reclassifies large numbers of people from well to patient without any change in their bodies. Because it licenses some conditions and disciplines others, medicalization is the mechanism by which medicine performs the social-control function that Zola identified (Zola, 1972). The demonstration below lets the reader slide a diagnostic threshold across a distribution of some underlying trait and watch how many people are reclassified from well to patient, making explicit how a definitional move alone can multiply the size of the patient population; the worked example that follows works the same arithmetic through by hand.

Stigma as Social Cognition

Where medicalization concerns the boundary of the medical, stigma concerns what happens to those who fall on its disfavored side. Bruce Link and Jo Phelan's influential conceptualization treats stigma not as a mark residing in the stigmatized individual but as a process requiring the convergence of several components: a human difference is labeled, the label is linked to negative stereotypes, the labeled are set apart as a separate category, they lose status and are discriminated against, and the whole depends on the exercise of social, economic, and political power (Link & Phelan, 2001). This unpacking makes stigma a case of socially structured social cognition: the stereotyping and out-group categorization studied in the psychology of prejudice are its cognitive engine, but which differences become salient, and with what consequences, is fixed by social structure rather than by individual bias alone. The reframing matters most for health because stigma is not only a source of distress but a cause of disease in its own right. Structural stigma, the societal conditions, institutional policies, and cultural norms that constrain the opportunities and wellbeing of the stigmatized, has been shown to operate as a distal driver of population health, so that changes in the stigma climate track changes in the mental and physical health of stigmatized groups (Hatzenbuehler, 2016). On these grounds stigma has been argued to satisfy the criteria for a fundamental cause of population health inequalities, because it involves access to multiple resources, affects multiple diseases through multiple pathways, and reproduces disadvantage as the specific mechanisms change (Hatzenbuehler, Phelan, & Link, 2013). Public attitudes are not fixed: national surveys tracking the stigma of mental illness in the United States found that although the public increasingly endorses a neuroscientific understanding of conditions such as depression, the desire for social distance from affected people has been slow to fall, showing that a change in causal beliefs does not automatically dissolve the categorical separation at the heart of stigma (Pescosolido, Halpern-Manners, Luo, & Perry, 2021).

Fundamental Causes and the Health Gradient

The most consequential idea to come out of late-twentieth-century medical sociology is fundamental cause theory, Link and Phelan's explanation of a stubborn empirical fact: the association between social position and health has persisted, and in some respects widened, across a century in which the leading causes of death changed completely, from infectious to chronic disease, and in which one proximate risk factor after another was identified and addressed (Link & Phelan, 1995). If disadvantage caused disease only through specific mechanisms, then eliminating a mechanism, cleaning the water, curbing smoking, should erase the associated inequality. Instead the gradient reasserts itself, because socioeconomic status is a fundamental cause: it commands flexible resources, money, knowledge, prestige, power, and beneficial social connections, that can be deployed to avoid whatever risks and secure whatever protections a given era makes available (Phelan, Link, & Tehranifar, 2010). When a new preventive technology appears, the advantaged adopt it first and most fully, so the very progress that lowers overall mortality can widen the relative gap. The theory subsumes the broader epidemiological finding, made vivid by Michael Marmot's work, that health follows a social gradient running the full length of the status hierarchy rather than a simple threshold of poverty, so that each step up the ladder brings better health even among the comfortably off (Marmot, 2005). Among the resources that matter, social connection is itself protective: the structure and support of a person's social ties influence physical and mental health through behavioral, psychosocial, and physiological pathways, giving the socially embedded a durable advantage (Thoits, 2011). A retrospective on the theory's first quarter-century concludes that its core prediction, that inequalities concentrate in precisely those health outcomes over which human agency and resources have the most leverage, has held up well and now guides where to expect the widest disparities (Clouston & Link, 2021). The demonstration below lets the reader eliminate specific proximate risks one by one and watch the mortality gradient between advantaged and disadvantaged groups persist as flexible resources are redeployed to the next available protection.

Help-Seeking and Illness Behavior

Long before a person reaches a physician they must first decide that something is wrong and that help is warranted, and medical sociology has studied this illness behavior as a socially embedded form of decision making. The older image of the patient as a rational calculator weighing the costs and benefits of care in isolation fits the evidence poorly. Bernice Pescosolido's Network Episode Model recasts help-seeking as a social process unfolding through the person's networks: the recognition that a problem exists, the interpretation of what it means, and the choice of what to do are worked out in interaction with family, friends, and community, who supply the illness labels, press or discourage particular responses, and often make the decisions for those too impaired to make them (Pescosolido, 1992). This is help-seeking under real cognitive and social constraint rather than the frictionless optimization of textbook models, and it connects the discipline directly to accounts of bounded rationality. The same social-embedding logic bears on why some people stay well under adversity that sickens others. Aaron Antonovsky's salutogenic model shifted the question from what causes disease to what sustains health, and located part of the answer in a generalized orientation he called the sense of coherence, the extent to which a person experiences the world as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful, a disposition he argued helps people mobilize resources and resist the pathogenic effects of stress (Antonovsky, 1993). Where a person's model of a chronic condition tells them nothing they do can affect it, the resulting passivity resembles the learned helplessness that follows from perceived uncontrollability, tying the sociology of illness behavior back to the psychology of control.

Worked Example

Medicalization can be made quantitative by treating a diagnostic threshold as a cut point on a distribution of some underlying trait, the logic behind the claim that widening a definition multiplies the patient pool without any change in bodies. Suppose inattentiveness, blood pressure, or low mood is distributed across a population approximately as a standard normal variable, with mean 0 and standard deviation 1, and that a diagnosis is assigned to everyone scoring above a cutoff. Set the cutoff first at z = 2, a conservative definition reserving the label for clearly extreme cases. The proportion diagnosed is the area of the normal curve above z = 2, which is about 0.023, or 2.3 percent of the population. Now let the definition loosen, as Conrad describes happening across one condition after another, and move the cutoff to z = 1. The proportion above z = 1 is about 0.159, or 15.9 percent. The diagnostic pool has grown from 2.3 to 15.9 percent of the population, a factor of roughly 6.9, from a shift of a single standard deviation in where the line is drawn. In a population of one million that is a jump from about 23,000 patients to about 159,000, some 136,000 people reclassified from well to sick by a change of definition alone (Conrad, 2005). Two lessons follow. First, because the normal curve is dense near its center, the same one-unit move of the cutoff reclassifies far more people when the threshold sits closer to the average, so incremental loosening near the middle of a distribution has outsized effects. Second, the newly diagnosed are by construction the mildest cases, so average severity within the patient category falls as the category expands, which is precisely the pattern critics of over-diagnosis observe. The arithmetic is a schematic of a social process, not a claim about any particular disorder, but it shows why the placement of a diagnostic boundary is a decision with large and calculable consequences.

Discussion

Medical sociology and cognitive psychology converge on a single recognition: that sickness is in large part a matter of interpretation, and that interpretation is socially organized. The sick role is a shared schema, the common-sense model a structured representation, medicalization an act of categorization, stigma a socially structured process of stereotyping and separation, and help-seeking a socially embedded decision. In each case a cognitive process that psychology can describe in the individual is shown by sociology to be patterned by social structure, institutions, and culture. This is not a reduction of one field to the other but a division of labor. Psychology can specify the mechanisms by which a patient forms and revises an illness representation or by which a stereotype is activated; sociology explains why the representations take the contents they do, why some differences and not others become stigmatized, and why the whole distribution of health tracks the distribution of resources. The practical stakes are considerable. Interventions built on the common-sense model succeed when they revise a patient's representation rather than merely restating the medical facts, and campaigns against stigma that change causal beliefs without addressing the categorical separation and the structural conditions behind it may leave the health consequences of stigma largely intact (Hatzenbuehler, 2016). Fundamental cause theory issues the most sobering caution: that inequalities in health will regenerate around each new medical advance unless the underlying maldistribution of resources is addressed, so that a purely biomedical strategy, however successful against particular diseases, cannot by itself close the gap. The open questions are correspondingly large, and turn on how tightly the social and the cognitive are coupled, and on how far the representations that drive behavior can be changed without changing the social conditions that produced them.

Current Directions

The most active current work is pushing all of these ideas toward mechanism and measurement. Research on the common-sense model has moved from documenting that illness representations predict outcomes to testing the dynamic, self-regulating loop the theory posits, using longitudinal and experimental designs to ask whether changing a representation changes coping and whether the feedback from coping actually revises the representation as the model requires (Hagger et al., 2017). The study of stigma has turned decisively toward its structural forms, developing measures of the policies, norms, and institutional arrangements that constitute structural stigma and linking them to health outcomes, an approach that reframes stigma reduction as a matter of changing environments rather than only individual attitudes (Hatzenbuehler, 2016). Long-run surveillance of public attitudes has become fine-grained enough to separate change in causal beliefs from change in the desire for social distance, revealing that the two move independently and that the biomedical framing promoted to reduce blame has not reliably reduced rejection (Pescosolido et al., 2021). Fundamental cause theory is being sharpened into testable predictions about exactly which health outcomes should show the widest inequalities, namely those most amenable to the deployment of flexible resources, and about how new technologies redistribute advantage as they diffuse (Clouston & Link, 2021). Across these fronts the discipline is increasingly quantitative and increasingly engaged with psychology, treating the social patterning of cognition not as a slogan but as a set of measurable relationships. The line of argument connects naturally to the broader study of social cognition and to the analysis of health decisions as instances of constrained decision making.

Common Misconceptions

Medical sociology is just medicine with some social context added.

It is a distinct analytic stance that treats medicine itself as an object of study, asking how disease is defined, how medical authority is exercised, and how health is distributed. Its central distinction between disease as biological disturbance and illness as socially interpreted experience is not an add-on to medicine but a reframing of what sickness is (Timmermans & Haas, 2008).

Medicalization means that fake diseases are being invented.

The claim is analytic, not debunking: medicalization describes a shift in how a condition is defined and managed, from a moral, legal, or ordinary matter to a medical one, and says nothing by itself about whether the condition is real or the treatment effective. Real suffering can be medicalized and real relief can follow; the sociological point is that the boundary of the medical is a social decision with consequences (Conrad, 2005).

Health inequalities would disappear if we removed the specific risk factors that harm poorer people.

This is exactly what fundamental cause theory predicts will fail. Because advantaged groups command flexible resources that can be redeployed against whatever risks matter in a given era, eliminating one proximate mechanism tends to leave the gradient intact as the resources move to the next available protection. Closing the gap requires addressing the distribution of resources itself, not only the current risk factors (Phelan et al., 2010).

Glossary

Biographical disruption.

The rupture that chronic illness produces in a person's taken-for-granted assumptions, relationships, and life narrative, treated as a core feature of the illness experience.

Biomedicalization.

The extension of medical attention, through genomics, risk screening, and enhancement, from treating illness to optimizing and monitoring bodies defined as merely at risk.

Common-sense model.

Leventhal's theory that patients self-regulate around a structured illness representation, so that coping and adherence track the representation rather than the medical facts alone.

Disease and illness.

The distinction between disease as the biological disturbance and illness as the lived, socially interpreted experience of being unwell; the two need not coincide.

Fundamental cause.

A social condition that commands flexible resources usable against many risks, so its association with disease persists even as the specific mechanisms linking it to health change.

Health gradient.

The graded association between social position and health running the full length of the status hierarchy, so that each step up brings better health, not merely a threshold below which poverty harms.

Illness behavior.

The ways people recognize, interpret, and act on symptoms, including the decision that something is wrong and that help is needed, before and apart from any clinical encounter.

Illness representation.

The organized mental model a patient forms of a condition along the dimensions of identity, cause, timeline, consequences, and control, which guides their coping.

Medicalization.

The process by which non-medical problems come to be defined and treated as illnesses or disorders, extending medical description and jurisdiction over new domains of life.

Network Episode Model.

Pescosolido's account of help-seeking as a social process worked out through a person's networks, rather than an isolated cost-benefit calculation.

Salutogenesis.

Antonovsky's orientation to what keeps people healthy rather than what makes them ill, centered on the sense of coherence as a resource against stress.

Sense of coherence.

A generalized disposition to experience the world as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful, proposed as a buffer that helps people mobilize resources under stress.

Sick role.

Parsons's schema of illness as a temporary social status with two rights, exemption from duties and freedom from blame, and two duties, wanting to recover and seeking competent help.

Social control.

The function by which an institution regulates deviation from norms; medicine performs it by licensing some departures as illness and disciplining others.

Stigma.

A process in which a labeled difference is linked to negative stereotypes, sets people apart, and leads to status loss and discrimination, sustained by the exercise of power.

Structural stigma.

The societal conditions, institutional policies, and cultural norms that constrain the opportunities and health of stigmatized groups, independent of any individual's prejudice.

Key Researchers

Aaron Antonovsky (1923-1994). Medical sociologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; he founded the salutogenic model, shifting the question from what causes disease to what sustains health, and built the Sense of Coherence scale to measure it. Wikipedia

Michael Bury (1945-2025). Sociologist at Royal Holloway, University of London; he introduced the concept of chronic illness as biographical disruption, showing how long-term conditions break a person's assumptions and life narrative. Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikipedia

Kathy Charmaz (1939-2020). Medical sociologist at Sonoma State University; through studies of chronically ill people she described the loss of self as a fundamental form of suffering, and developed constructivist grounded theory. ORCID - Faculty Page - Wikipedia

Peter Conrad (1945-2024). Sociologist at Brandeis University; the leading theorist of medicalization, he traced how non-medical problems become medical conditions and how the drivers of that process shifted from the professions to markets and technology. Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikipedia

Mark L. Hatzenbuehler. Psychologist at Harvard University; he extended fundamental-cause reasoning to stigma, showing that structural stigma acts as a distal driver of population health inequalities across mental and physical health. ORCID - Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikipedia

Howard Leventhal. Health psychologist at Rutgers University; he built the common-sense model of self-regulation, formalizing how patients' illness representations along dimensions of identity, cause, timeline, consequences, and control guide their coping. Faculty Page

Bruce G. Link. Sociologist at the University of California, Riverside; with Jo Phelan he formulated the theory of social conditions as fundamental causes of disease and co-authored the field's canonical conceptualization of stigma. ORCID - Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikipedia

Talcott Parsons (1902-1979). Sociologist at Harvard University; he defined the sick role, the founding concept of medical sociology, casting illness as a socially sanctioned form of deviance governed by rights and obligations. Wikipedia

Bernice A. Pescosolido. Sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington; she developed the Network Episode Model of help-seeking and has tracked long-run trends in public stigma toward mental illness across decades of national surveys. ORCID - Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikipedia

Jo C. Phelan. Sociologist at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health; with Bruce Link she co-developed fundamental cause theory and the modified labeling and stigma frameworks that structure how the field explains persistent health inequalities. Wikipedia

Frequently Asked Questions

What is medical sociology?
Medical sociology is the branch of sociology that studies the social dimensions of health, illness, and medicine: how societies define who is sick, how the institutions of medicine are organized and exercise authority, and how a person's social position shapes both their exposure to illness and their experience of it (Timmermans & Haas, 2008).

What is the sick role?
The sick role is Talcott Parsons's concept of illness as a temporary social status. It grants the ill two rights, exemption from normal duties and freedom from blame for their condition, in exchange for two obligations, to regard being sick as undesirable and to seek and cooperate with competent help (Parsons, 1951).

What is the difference between disease and illness?
In medical sociology, disease refers to the underlying biological disturbance, while illness refers to the lived, socially interpreted experience of being unwell. The two do not always coincide: a person can have a disease without feeling ill, or feel ill without an identifiable disease, which is why the discipline studies illness as a social state in its own right (Timmermans & Haas, 2008).

What is medicalization?
Medicalization is the process by which problems not previously understood in medical terms, such as alcoholism, hyperactivity, shyness, or aspects of aging, come to be defined and treated as medical conditions. The key change is definitional, and contemporary medicalization is driven increasingly by commercial and technological forces rather than the medical profession alone (Conrad, 2005).

What is the common-sense model of illness?
It is Howard Leventhal's theory that patients actively build a structured mental representation of an illness, organized along dimensions of identity, cause, timeline, consequences, and control, and that this representation, rather than the medical facts by themselves, drives how they cope and whether they adhere to treatment (Leventhal et al., 2016).

What is fundamental cause theory?
Fundamental cause theory explains why the link between social position and health persists even as the leading diseases and their risk factors change. Because advantaged groups command flexible resources, money, knowledge, power, and social connection, that can be used against whatever risks matter in a given era, health inequalities regenerate around each new medical advance unless the distribution of resources itself is addressed (Link & Phelan, 1995).

How does stigma affect health?
Stigma is not only a source of distress but a cause of disease. As a process of labeling, stereotyping, separation, and status loss sustained by power, it restricts the resources and opportunities of affected groups; structural stigma in particular acts as a distal driver of population health, so that changes in the stigma climate track changes in health outcomes (Hatzenbuehler, 2016).

Why do people delay seeking medical help?
Help-seeking is a socially embedded decision rather than an isolated calculation. In Pescosolido's Network Episode Model, recognizing a problem, interpreting it, and choosing what to do are worked out through interaction with family, friends, and community, who supply illness labels and press or discourage particular responses, which can hasten or delay reaching formal care (Pescosolido, 1992).

References

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Bury, M. (1982). Chronic illness as biographical disruption. Sociology of Health & Illness, 4(2), 167-182. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.ep11339939

Charmaz, K. (1983). Loss of self: A fundamental form of suffering in the chronically ill. Sociology of Health & Illness, 5(2), 168-195. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.ep10491512

Clarke, A. E., Shim, J. K., Mamo, L., Fosket, J. R., & Fishman, J. R. (2003). Biomedicalization: Technoscientific transformations of health, illness, and U.S. biomedicine. American Sociological Review, 68(2), 161-194. https://doi.org/10.2307/1519765

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Hagger, M. S., Koch, S., Chatzisarantis, N. L. D., & Orbell, S. (2017). The common-sense model of self-regulation: Meta-analysis and test of a process model. Psychological Bulletin, 143(11), 1117-1154. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000118

Hatzenbuehler, M. L., Phelan, J. C., & Link, B. G. (2013). Stigma as a fundamental cause of population health inequalities. American Journal of Public Health, 103(5), 813-821. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2012.301069

Hatzenbuehler, M. L. (2016). Structural stigma: Research evidence and implications for psychological science. American Psychologist, 71(8), 742-751. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000068

Leventhal, H., Phillips, L. A., & Burns, E. (2016). The Common-Sense Model of Self-Regulation (CSM): A dynamic framework for understanding illness self-management. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 39(6), 935-946. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-016-9782-2

Link, B. G., & Phelan, J. (1995). Social conditions as fundamental causes of disease. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 35(Extra Issue), 80-94. https://doi.org/10.2307/2626958

Link, B. G., & Phelan, J. C. (2001). Conceptualizing stigma. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 363-385. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.363

Marmot, M. (2005). Social determinants of health inequalities. The Lancet, 365(9464), 1099-1104. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(05)71146-6

Parsons, T. (1951). Illness and the role of the physician: A sociological perspective. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 21(3), 452-460. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.1951.tb00003.x

Pescosolido, B. A. (1992). Beyond rational choice: The social dynamics of how people seek help. American Journal of Sociology, 97(4), 1096-1138. https://doi.org/10.1086/229863

Pescosolido, B. A., Halpern-Manners, A., Luo, L., & Perry, B. (2021). Trends in public stigma of mental illness in the United States, 1996-2018. JAMA Network Open, 4(12), e2140202. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.40202

Phelan, J. C., Link, B. G., & Tehranifar, P. (2010). Social conditions as fundamental causes of health inequalities: Theory, evidence, and policy implications. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 51(1_suppl), S28-S40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022146510383498

Thoits, P. A. (2011). Mechanisms linking social ties and support to physical and mental health. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 52(2), 145-161. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022146510395592

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Zola, I. K. (1972). Medicine as an institution of social control. The Sociological Review, 20(4), 487-504. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1972.tb00220.x