The educational objectives are outlined as the realization of a plan of study designed to present some Sociology of Health and Illness issues as specifically configured on the peculiarities of the training process offered to students of the Bachelor of Occupational Therapy. Particular attention will be paid in highlighting those theoretical-conceptual tools and empirical guidance through which to develop those analytical sensitivities increasingly necessary to identify, in general, the delicate relationship between demand and supply of health resources in contemporary societies, and more specifically, the problems that characterize the provision and the function of occupational therapy according to its own application fields.
The culturalization of illness and the therapeutic process;
Organized groups, health facilities and the use of therapeutic resources;
The health-illness dichotomy in the heart of the social system: roles and tasks;
The two great fields of pathogenic strains: family and working fields;
The sociological analysis projected on the Health-Illness Related Behavior;
The inversion of pathogenic strains and the role of occupational therapy.
1) Medicine and Society. In the heart of the social system.
2) The socio-cultural components of Health-Illness related behavior. The HBM - The HRA. Medical model and moral model.
3) The first ethnographic approaches to health and illness and their overcome.
4) The Parsonsian theory. The sick role and its institutionalization.
5) Somatic disease and mental illness. Roles and tasks. Pathogenic strains between system of personality and social system.
6) The therapeutic process as a form of social control in the doctor-patient dynamics system.
7) Criticism of Parsonsian perspective. The theme of mental illness. Integration Vs adaptation. Psychiatry and anti-psychiatry.
8) The sociology of medicine in the debate on the redefinition of welfare state. The tragic choices in health care.
9) The corporatization of health care and the overcoming of pure medical model.
Vignera R., Protagonisti e interpreti della sociologia sanitaria, FrancoAngeli, Milano, 2005, first part, capp. I, III, IV.