Waterstones The Myth of Mental Illness
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Price: £12.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: Thomas Szasz's classic book revolutionised thinking throughout the world about the nature of the psychiatric profession and the moral implications of its practices. By diagnosing behaviour problems as 'mental illness', psychiatry, Szasz argues, absolves the individual of responsibility for his actions, placing blame instead on the illness. In The Myth of Mental Illness, he attacks Freudian psychology as a dangerous pseudo-science and critiques the overreach of psychology into all aspects of modern life.
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9780061771224
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9780061771224
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Author: The Sweet poetry of Pus
Rating: 5
Review: Thomas Szasz, vociferous, unwavering opponent of coercive psychiatry and the many it has and continues to ruin, unleashed a lot of irrational forces amongst the psychiatric establishment when he wrote this exceptional critique of the concept of mental illness. It still remains a concept from my perspective, as many epistemological studies into how researchers came to the conclusion that mental illnesses are positive truths, genetic in aetiology, and diseases of the brain, seem to me to show. Perhaps the most contemptible thing amongst all eras of psychiatry, apart from its barbarous therapeutics, is its dogmatism and its harnessing of language to the purpose of mass deception, deceptions that may strain credulity for the independent thinker, but are unthinkingly internalised by the herd who probably find it quite pleasing to think that the false dichotomy of sane and insane exists and they are the healthy ones. As Szasz cogently propounds in this book, a pathology is something you discover, something corporeal, and not something relative to someone else's framework of perception and ideological and moral beliefs. Yet researchers and neo-Kraepelinians alike continue to persist obdurately in their folly. They assume as axiomatic their beliefs, looking at things through their own hermeneutic frameworks that predisposes the research to the desired result, yet the evidence derived from things such as the twin-studies seems to me to be preponderantly weighted towards an environmental causation rather than a genetic one for the putative illness of people like myself. Many seem to find inconceivable the role that cognitive biases play in the conclusions derived from these studies because, after all, the whole psychiatric establishment needs confirmation of its hypotheses to authenticate its existence. However, this isn't a conspiracy, no, just humans, limitless in their capacity for self-deception, being humans. They seem not to be conversant with the sophistical processes and mechanisms of their own minds. They might want to read about the Experimenter's bias. Yet there is a systematic unwillingness amongst many psychiatrists and thoose who espouse the neo-Kraepelinian beliefs to treat the indivdual as if he didn't live in a vacuum or to account for the dialectic between man and his environment, the infinite variability of experience. To them, these are only of subsidiary importance in understanding that most stultifying of labels ascribed arbitrarily by one human to another; mental illness. Szasz has argued throughout his long career that the conventional wisdom regarding the psychiatric establishment is also mythological in character, and that the view of the psychiatrist or the psychiatric nurse as merely dispatching a duty to the citizen is a hideous self-deception and rationalisation of what is, perhaps, another chapter in the metanarrative in human history of the systematic oppression of the powerless by the powerful. Society ritually scapegoats men and women and is never held to account, and in the current system of majoritarian democracy with its attendant myths of tolerance and fairness, where mass opinions and values are extolled to the high heavens and anyone who criticises courts the scurrilites of the complacent mob, the majority-minority dichotomy is as relevant as ever, and that psychiatry performs a function for the state and society predominantly, is something Szasz has perennially argued to be the case. As, to my mind, he has successfully argued throughout his career, intolerance of differences (a phrase that is something of an anathema in our disingenuous age of purported pluralism and tolerant values...what conceited tripe!) is a regular feature of human societies, and psychiatry and its coercive apparatus is baneful in influence to the individual. As a person who has had direct sensory experience of these things I can testify to the way in which it disarms the individual under the pretence of noble intentions, which in my opinion, only the most terminally naive would believe in because, once the stigma is attached to you, it becomes a weapon in the hands of others who use it as a rationalisation for detainment and coercive treatment and also in arguments in general, conveniently attributing your every action and word to your supposed disease with impunity, and often shifting blame from themselves, as I learnt much to my chagrin whilst on a ward. One of the obvious reasons why people find the concept of mental illness so seductive is because most people will tend to believe in what the common herd believes, as much as anything as to consolidate their position in society, and to not do or believe in anything that may pose a threat to their social, economic and sexual security and prospects, in my opinion, after all, there are many punitive and marginalising mechanisms in place for society's secular heretics. Their laughs and general smug, self-congratulatory dismissiveness is little no more than an expression of herd behaviour, of an ovine mentality that strikes me as little more than an encumbrance to progress. Yet the seeming overconfidence of those who who are convinced, for example, in the brain disease hypothesis, is ridiculous. Always the same apodictic mannerisms characterise their discourse, always feigned laughter, always an excess of adverbs such as 'truly' and 'definitely' and 'incontestably', and never anything to moderate such arrogance and absurd peremptoriness. Their lust for authority is 'truly' monumental.
Author: Nicky01
Rating: 3
Review: It's a classic, so I read it again recently, but the language and concepts reflect the issues at the time, so its more of a historical piece, than a critique with much resonance for the modern day. Still worth reading though. Also, from a psychiatric perspective, most of the patients do not seem to be suffering from a major psychiatric illness in modern terms
