I am reading "The Myth of Mental Illness" by Thomas Szasz.
It is good and relatively readable.
There is something that is nagging at me as I read it and which I have not as yet felt to be resolved.
It is this.
It is clear that Szasz regards the concept of a mental illness to be a mistake and entirely unserviceable and useless since there can only be a biological illness.
Therefore mental illness does not exist. It is only a metaphor like a "sick" society, a "sick" economy, a "sick" joke.
My problem is that Szasz disallows and rules out (or seems to so far) this approach to mental illness. That he strictly rules out the idea that a mind can be metaphorically sick.
He does this on the grounds that the view that a mind is sick depends on the arbitrary view of the person defining it since there is no biological problem.
A healthy mind is a mind that someone defines as healthy according to their view of what healthy means.
"MENTAL ILLNESS" could be 1 or 2 or all of these 3:
1) A biological illness with a biological cause. A biological disease.
- Or perhaps a biological proclivity to mental illness that is triggered by a social cause and/or life events.
- Or a biological illness caused by social events/life events.
That this illness is organic in origin.
This is the view of Charcot, Freud and conventional psychiatry. I think! ? :)
Karl Wernicke: "mental diseases are brain diseases."
Szasz maintains, correctly in my view, that such "diseases" are invented rather than discovered.
2) Mental illness is a psychological condition, disorder or syndrome. It is only metaphorically an illness or "disease".
A mind is only metaphorically sick. It is non-biological and has a social cause and/or is caused by life events.
This is the view of some psychologists but not many psychiatrists.
Szasz would maybe say that this view amounts to nothing since it can only be called an illness in this case as a metaphor.
3) Mental illness is (socially) deviant behaviour as defined by the person who calls it an illness.
In other words when someone says: "I believe x to be mentally ill" all that we can say is that they really mean "I disapprove of the thoughts and behaviour of x".
Mental illness does not and cannot exist.
This seems to be Szasz's view.
The mind is only a concept. It has no physical existence. ..
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Szasz seems to be trying to clarify, analyse and improve on woolly thinking.
He is correct in his analysis I think.
But what if there is such a thing as a psychologically and mentally healthy mind if only as a metaphor? What if a psychologist were to say to Szasz "I fully accept that to talk of a sick mind is totally OK, because I am using this as a metaphor. And it is a useful, accurate and appropriate metaphor"?
Has he based his whole system on what could be portrayed as some kind of linguistic misunderstanding?
I do not think that he has for a second, but it would be good to investigate the point.
Szasz might say that the only way anyone can call a mind sick is if they simply disapprove of it.
Nothing else can be said.
......is that correct? Is my interpretation of Szasz correct? And if I am correct is he correct in his view?
.....
22nd March 2007
I have now finished reading and to some extent studying this book and am broadly convinced by it.
He does seem to base his whole system on the fact that a mind can only be metaphorically sick. He seems to offer no further reason why mental illness cannot exist.
Whilst he analyses the "symptoms" in some cases, he seems to offer little analysis of some of the "symptoms" of "mental illness" since there is no such thing.
In the case of hysteria, he does not seem to confront what would be a conventional psychiatric analysis of hysteria head on.
He choses "hysteria" as the model of a "mental illness" in the first part.
In the second part he choses game playing as a more useful way of seeing human life than the medical model.
I will continue my studies of Szasz.
I am now thinking of reading some Foucault. He is another thinker who questions the idea of "mental illness".
I have also been pointed towards "Insanity - the Idea and its Consequences" as a key work by Szasz.
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May 08.
Simple solution to some of the agonising related above:
A metaphorical illness is a metaphor and not an illness.