Thomas Szasz was a Hungarian-American psychiatrist, who wrote a famous book, "The Myth of Mental Illness".
He thought mental illnesses are not really illnesses - instead they are simply "problems in living", i.e. emotional problems, caused by the emotional stresses of modern society, with all its complexity and competition. In his words, there are "neither biological or chemical tests nor biopsy or necropsy findings for verifying DSM diagnoses" (the DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, which is the de facto standard for mental illness definitions used by American psychiatrists).
He didn't think psychiatry was useless though - he was a psychiatrist himself, and he strongly believed in psychotherapy between a consenting patient and doctor. But he strongly criticised involuntarily and coercive psychiatry, believing that it violated the rights of patients.
I agree with him a lot. The only condition I'm familiar with where I think you could say it might be a genuine illness is schizophrenia, because your risk of schizophrenia is thought to be 80% genetic, implying that physical genes are somehow causing the condition. The mechanism is of course not yet understood. As for something like depression, that's thought to only be 40% genetic, implying that 60% of your risk is outside your genetics - things like upbringing, and your life conditions. So in that case it definitely seems to me that depression is just a "problem in living". Some genes just probably make your life shitter, e.g. make you uglier or something, which in turn makes you depressed.
What do you think, /sci/?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia
He thought mental illnesses are not really illnesses - instead they are simply "problems in living", i.e. emotional problems, caused by the emotional stresses of modern society, with all its complexity and competition. In his words, there are "neither biological or chemical tests nor biopsy or necropsy findings for verifying DSM diagnoses" (the DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, which is the de facto standard for mental illness definitions used by American psychiatrists).
He didn't think psychiatry was useless though - he was a psychiatrist himself, and he strongly believed in psychotherapy between a consenting patient and doctor. But he strongly criticised involuntarily and coercive psychiatry, believing that it violated the rights of patients.
I agree with him a lot. The only condition I'm familiar with where I think you could say it might be a genuine illness is schizophrenia, because your risk of schizophrenia is thought to be 80% genetic, implying that physical genes are somehow causing the condition. The mechanism is of course not yet understood. As for something like depression, that's thought to only be 40% genetic, implying that 60% of your risk is outside your genetics - things like upbringing, and your life conditions. So in that case it definitely seems to me that depression is just a "problem in living". Some genes just probably make your life shitter, e.g. make you uglier or something, which in turn makes you depressed.
What do you think, /sci/?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia
