Symbolic Interactionists like to understand the world by understanding the specific meanings and causes that society attributes to particular events. When analyzing health and illness, symbolic interactionists like to focus on individuals or groups and how they make sense of their particular illness. Then they take this information and see how it affects their relationships with others and how it causes them to perceive themselves. Symbolic interactionist theory also asserts that we socially construct health and illness, much like we do with race. For example, if someone spends their days looking at the sun and becomes blind, people blame them for looking at the sun. They believe that if they don't look at the sun, they won't go blind. The same reasoning generally follows people with lung cancer or AIDS. The person is blamed for contracting the disease, regardless of how they contracted it; people assume that it is the sick who are responsible. There is no doubt that there are biological attributes that can clearly define a disease, but there is also a human arbitrary element. For example, at one point being homosexual was considered a mental illness, this is no longer the case. The process of giving medical treatments and attributes to non-medical problems is known as medicalization. This can happen on three levels; the conceptual level, the institutional level and the interactional level. The conceptual level is usually just using medical jargon to define the problem. It is at the institutional level that a doctor actually treats and monitors the problem. The interactional level is where doctors actually treat patients' conditions as medical problems. To clarify, think of a person with anxious legs, on a conceptual level...... middle of article...... symbolic interactionist theory, the main area of ​​focus is deviance. Health professionals and society as a whole tend to view people with mental illness as deviant. Many people view disability as deviant because either the disabled person cannot conform to societal norms or it would be extremely embarrassing for them to do so. People with mental illness often have their other labels and attributes overlooked and people focus on the illness. The degree to which other people with mental illness are neglected depends on three factors: whether or not they were responsible for their disability, the apparent severity of their condition, and the perceived legitimacy of their illness. Just as medicalization and demedicalization are societal constructs, expectations of people with mental illness are also socially constructed..