I am going to have to apologize in advance. I am a bit of an ass when it comes to western conceptions of "mental health." As I am going through a super huge rough life change and am rather angry at all institutions that seem to only use logic and historical fact when it applies to its own justification, in addition to dispelling or mineralizing anything that may ebb at its self-proposed superiority. 

I was raised by parents with backgrounds in mental health an am still appalled at the standardized tradition of ignoring most conceptions of health that skew outside of a classical monotheistic/ western tradition. Christian concepts of sin have shaped and dictated what both illness and deviance are in the western systems. So far, literature has barely acknowledged that this is a myopic viewpoint. But beyond realizing that our accepted norms of society and health are essentially westernized monotheistic traditions, the "sociology of health and mental illness" seems to ignore most of the variety of global concepts of existence as well as historical concepts of the self. Again, those outside of the monotheistic traditions, excluding one of its most contemporary interpretations, Islam (I give the Mormons credit, where temporal credit is due) are largely ignored when it comes to institutions of health in this country. So I question a field of study where it seems the most basic questions of the larger whole appear to go unasked.