Welcome to another blog post from carer Matthew Mckenzie. As you might have already know by now, my blog site is basically about mental health carers and how they can cope in regards to supporting those suffering mental health issues. However there will be times when I will divert away from carer topics and move onto educational topics related to mental health.

The topics usually covered on my site tend to range from psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, ethics and sociology. It has been a while since I have done a sociological topic and to be honest I have never really done a sociological video, but this time I have decided to blog about sociology. Why sociology you may ask? Well if someone is reflecting how mental illness can affect an individual, its only a matter of time before someone delves into how a group of people can be affect by mental health issues.

Sociology is a field which studies the behaviour of society, groups, communities regarding what affects that society. Sociology does of course also cover a broad range of topics which I ll tend to avoid, that being culture, crime and so on. However when it comes to carers or mental health, then i am interested in identity, institutions, relations, behaviour, theories and class.

Group of people together holding hands

This particular blog post gives a nice introduction to the origins of sociology, which you can see in the video below. The video presents a list of famous people who have contributed to the field of sociology, not all persons mentioned in this  were sociologists and a large part of those mentioned did not even tackle much on mental health.

I could not cover every sociologist e.g. notice I did not mention Micheal Foucault, since he is in another video.  Anyway this video on this blog just gives a nice introduction on what famous people and books helped develop sociology.

In the future, I hope to raise more awareness of this important topic, I know sociology does not seem to be taken seriously as other fields e.g. economics, engineering or even science. However one cannot ignore that the behaviour of communities, groups and class will continue to exist. If we at least reflect on how the pressure of caring among younger or older carers differs or how one mental health problem occurs more in a particular community, then sociology will be the field of interest on this blog site.