Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences (original) (raw)

The notion of 'mental Illness' based on 'the myth of mental illness' by Thomas Szasz.

Many professionals believe that mental illness does not exist, and that it is a notion that belongs in literature, mythologies, and religion; and according to Szasz (1972), it may have been a concept useful in the 19th century, however today, it is a concept that is socially destructive and worthless. Despite that belief, society today considers all living problems and difficulties as psychiatric diseases, and everyone but the professionals are considered mentally ill (Szasz 1991, p.4), begging the question, ‘are all suffering mental illness?’ (Szasz, 1972). This paper will critically evaluate the notion of ‘mental illness’ in the diagnostic approach to mental health, and how relevant it is tp clinical psychology through the eyes of Thomas Szasz and other experts.

Thomas Szasz: The Uncompromising Rebel and Critic of Psychiatry

Psychiatria Polska, 2021

April 2020 marks what would have been the hundredth birthday of Professor Thomas Stephen Szasz, who passed away in 2012. This year was also the 60th anniversary of the first publication of his iconoclastic thesis on the “myth of mental illness.” In the present paper, Szasz’s main views on mental illness and modern psychiatry are summarized. By showing the origins of Szasz’s ideas in particular, it describes the following topics: Szasz’s distinction between bodily disease and mental illness, his preoccupation with the progressive medicalization of everyday life, his description of psychiatry as an institution of social control, his critique of the therapeutic state, i.e., the alliance between psychiatry and the state, and his deliberations on liberty, personal freedom and responsibility. While addressing Szasz’s main critics, the paper attempts to show the influence of Szasz’s concept on today’s psychiatry and stresses that despite well-deserved criticism he expressed some of the epistemological and ethical problems of modern psychiatry better than anyone else, which makes his legacy still important for the mental health practitioners of today.

Szasz and His Interlocutors: Reconsidering Thomas Szasz's “Myth of Mental Illness” Thesis

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 2008

proximally causes memory loss, both being presumably susceptible to a quantitative rendition-the continuum in question for Fulford is one of human value. Drawing upon the resources of philosophical value theory (e.g., Fulford, 1989; Hare, 1952), Fulford provides an account of the difference-in the order of valuebetween physical and mental illness, a difference he locates precisely in the extent to which they are differentially valued: Philosophical value theory generates a model which. .. suggests that the negative value judgements by which experiences. .. are. .. marked out as. .. illness, are the origin of the negative value judgements by which, in turn, the underlying bodily causes of those experiences. .. are marked out as pathological, and, hence, as diseases (2004, p. 75n, emphases added).

Response to Szasz: Medical incapacity, legal incompetence and psychiatry

Psychiatric Bulletin, 1999

to this article at You can respond http://pb.rcpsych.org/cgi/eletter-submit/23/9/520 from Downloaded The Royal College of Psychiatrists Published by on October 28, 2012 http://pb.rcpsych.org/ http://pb.rcpsych.org/site/subscriptions/ go to: The Psychiatrist To subscribe to

Psychiatry Fraud and Force? A commentary on E. Fuller Torrey and Thomas Szasz

2005

In a pair of articles in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, E. Fuller Torrey’s psychiatry is castigated by Thomas Szasz. In return, Torrey dismisses Szasz’ criticism as “increasingly anachronistic.” The current exchange clarifies the early ties between the two and their subsequent unraveling. Apparently at opposite ends of the psychiatric spectrum, Szasz and Torrey in fact have much in common and share foundational assumptions about mind and body, the definition of “disease,” the nature of medical practice and the nature of medical science. Their presuppositions, all readily challenged, are problematic for all of medicine including psychiatry. Physicians treat persons not diseases; people go to the doctor with ailments and illnesses and not with diseases; mental illnesses are not necessarily diseases; medicine is a social response to human need and not a pure science; medical science is a practical not a pure science. What is true for medicine in general is of course also true for psychiatry.

Schramme Szasz's Legacy and Current Problems in Psychiatry 2019 Final Author Version.docx

THOMAS SZASZ An appraisal of his legacy, 2019

Szasz’s legacy involves two issues in current psychiatry: First, he criticized the concept of mental illness. The DSM-5 debate shows that psychiatry still suffers from unresolved conceptual problems. The definition of the general concept of mental disorder remains unclear. Specific classificatory entities (e.g., autism spectrum disorder) are notoriously contested. Second, he criticized coercive psychiatric practice. Recent developments suggest an ongoing identity crisis of psychiatry as a medical institution. Psychiatry’s tasks are partly related to societal interests (e.g., dealing with dangerous persons). Two psychiatric forms of intervention are therapeutic coercion and compulsion to prevent harm to others. Whether the latter can be squared with therapeutic purposes is unclear. To justify paternalistic interventions such as therapeutic coercion is difficult. Hence, there is enormous pressure on psychiatry’s medical identity. Szasz asked the right questions, not necessarily providing the most convincing answers. Psychiatry would benefit from a thorough, less prejudiced assessment of his publications.

Forbidden Insanity: The Systematic Denial of Mental Health Issues from a State-Run Psychiatry

Psychiatria Danubina, 2018

The authors discuss the issue of psychiatric care and patients during the second half of XX century in Albania, when the country was under an absolute regime of communism. Completely isolated from the rest of the world, the territory remained a prohibited area for scholars, and local authors due to censorship or self-censorship, offered very scarce information. The general feeling of the public was that of a denial of psychic disorders in total, combined with the fear that this kind of disorders has ever since provoked. Nevertheless, insanity defence was a formulation encountered with a certain frequency in Albanian judicial procedures, although forensic psychiatry was a peripheral part of an already neglected medical specialty. The entire system of psychiatric care was mainly hospital based, and shock therapies (electroconvulsive therapy, pyretotherapy, insulin coma) were normal part of the therapeutic armamentarium along with antipsychotics and social isolation. Some recently unclassified documents and some archival papers, whose exhaustive consultation needs further study, might shed light to the problems of a psychiatry, that are not substantially different from the ones encountered in the Eastern communist Europe of the same period of time.

Mind and Madness: New Directions in the Philosophy of Psychiatry

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 1994

These are exciting times for philosophy and psychiatry. After drifting apart for most of this century, the two disciplines, if not yet fully reconciled, are suddenly at least on speaking terms. With hindsight we may wonder why they should have ignored each other for so long. As Anthony Quinton pointed out in a lecture to the Royal Institute of Philosophy a few years ago, it is remarkable that philosophers, in a sense the experts on rationality, should have had so little to say about the phenomena of irrationality (Quinton, 1985, ch. 2). There have been partial exceptions, of course. Descartes and Kant both touched on madness; and there were, notably, important philosophical influences on the development of modern psychiatry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Zilboorg and Henry, 1941). Yet even John Locke, who was a doctor as well as philosopher, confined himself to a fair-l y superficial distinction between what we should now call mental illness and mental defect—...