The Myth of Mental Illness
نویسنده
چکیده
MY aim in this essay is to raise the question "Is there such a thing as mental illness?" and to argue that there is not. Since the notion of mental illness is extremely widely used nowadays, inquiry into the ways in which this term is employed would seem to be especially indicated. Mental illness, of course, is not literally a "thing"—or physical object—and hence it can "exist" only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist. Yet, familiar theories are in the habit of posing, sooner or later —at least to those who come to believe in them •—as "objective truths" (or "facts"). During certain historical periods, explanatory conceptions such as deities, witches, and microorganisms appeared not only as theories but as self-evident causes of a vast number of events. I submit that today mental illness is widely regarded in a somewhat similar fashion, that is, as the cause of innumerable diverse happenings. As an antidote to the complacent use of the notion of mental illness— whether as a self-evident phenomenon, theory, or cause—-let us ask this question: What is meant when it is asserted that someone is mentally ill? In what follows I shall describe briefly the main uses to which the concept of mental illness has been put. I shall argue that this notion has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had and that it now functions merely as a convenient myth,
منابع مشابه
The Myth of Mental Illness
Mental Illness. By Thomas S. Szasz. {Seeker & Warburg, ̂ s\t Over a century and a half ago Pinel removed the chains from the insane , Paris, John Conolly in England introduced more humane methods of treatment them, and since the days of Charcot, Kraepelin and Freud, mental illness has W' the subject of scientific enquiry like other illnesses. The author of The Myth of Mental Illness puts forward...
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In the 1950s, when I wrote The Myth of Mental Illness, the notion that it is the responsibility of the federal government to provide "health care" to the American people had not yet entered national consciousness. Most persons called mental patients were then considered "chronic" and incurable and were confined in state mental hospitals. The physicians who cared for them were employees of the s...
متن کاملSzasz and His Interlocutors: Reconsidering Thomas Szasz’s “Myth of Mental Illness” Thesis
It is a matter of some irony that psychiatry’s most trenchant critic for over four decades is himself a psychiatrist. I refer to Thomas S. Szasz. Szasz’s core thesis may be succinctly rendered: mental illness is a “myth”, a “metaphor” which serves only to obscure the social and ethical “problems in living” we face as human beings. This paper reconsiders the conceptual bases of Szasz’s assault o...
متن کاملMental illness is indeed a myth
This chapter offers a novel defence of Szasz’s claim that mental illness is a myth by bringing to bear a standard type of thought experiment used in philosophical discussions of the meaning of natural kind concepts. This makes it possible to accept Szasz’s conclusion that mental illness involves problems of living, some of which may be moral in nature, while bypassing the debate about the meani...
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تاریخ انتشار 2005