How, why, and under what kinds of circumstances lay people consult for symptoms of emotional distress are topics that have commanded various degrees of attention from secondary and primary care professionals. We argue below that many of the responses made by such professionals to these issues carry within them a set of very important assumptions about how members of the lay public view psychiatric symptoms. Whether such assumptions are justified by the evidence is, however, a matter of some debate. In what follows we draw on some recent, sociologically informed research on lay attitudes to emotional distress so as to highlight the debates and to suggest some ways in which they might be resolved.