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Introduction
This article explores the implications of critical realism (CR) for social scientific research into mental health. CR is a philosophical position about natural and social science. Its premises can be traced in part to both Marx and Durkheim and, even further back, to the pre-Socratic work of Heraclitus, who dwelt on being more than knowing. This reverses the tradition from antiquity to the present of epistemological concerns being privileged over ontological ones, when considering theories in social science. CR informs both aspects of social science but rebalances our focus back onto being rather than knowing, without losing sight of epistemological matters.
CR below will be contrasted with positivism, hermeneutics and post-structuralism to situate it in relation to other traditions in social science, before drawing out some specific implications for mental health research. By the end of the article, it should be clear that as part of a 'return to realism' within the sociology of health and illness, the topic of mental health benefits from the philosophical orientation and sensitising analytical devices provided for us by CR.
The Premises and Philosophical Context of CR
In advance of its application to any field of enquiry (in this case mental health), the basic tenets of CR, for readers new to it, can be offered as follows:
Reality is differentiated and stratified. This ontological emphasis means that the world is understood differently from other accounts of social science with an epistemological emphasis .
Generative mechanisms exist in the world leading to emergent properties, within, and at different levels of, reality. This causal emphasis implies that social scientists should be interested in how things come into being and change, not merely how they are 'represented' or are 'constructed' in knowledge claims.
Because of the recognition that the world exists and it is described and theorised, CR makes a distinction between the independent characteristic of reality (point 1 above) and the observations and theorisations made of or about it by researchers. The first aspect for CR is called intransitive , whereas the second aspect is called transitive . The intransitive aspects of reality continue independent of human activity, whereas the transitive aspects are bound up inextricably with that activity. All science is a form of human production like any...