Social Capital and Mental Health: Causative and Interactive Models and Mechanisms

Different approaches had identified different explanations about the causes mental diseases incidence. The biological and psychological approaches believe that it is a physiological stressful conditions or childhood experiences. Whereas، the sociological schools believe that the main factor of these diseases are unequal social structures، social roles، absence of social supporting sources and social capital. Litlerature review The studies show that increasing the level of mistrust leads to decrease the level of social commitment، social cooperation and increase in the social pathologies. Social capital declines the effect of negative events in life (such as losing job or family problems) and will make the long – run problems (such as long – run mental and physical diseases) tolerable. this research reviews sociological approaches to the social capital and health، to detect the mechanism in which social capital affect mental health to the theoretical (causative and interactive) related to the topic. The findings based on the literature reviews show that social capital، social and supportive networks lead to feel well، decrease anxiety (stress)، increase the strengthen of defensive system of the body and finally improve the mental health. This study attempt to detect the mechanism in which mental health is affected by social capital regarding interactive models and theoretical models (causative – linear) includes the models in the macro، median and micro levels. Finally theoretical models of Nan Lin and James Colman were chose as the final models which could study these two variables in the median level.