A psychiatrist who didn’t believe in mental illness (2013)
Szasz&#x27;s &quot;The Myth of Mental Illness&quot; is one of those works which is completely and utterly misinterpreted simply because of the title.<p>I don&#x27;t have the book available at the moment, but in the introduction he says something to the effect of &quot;I don&#x27;t regret writing this book, but I regret calling it what I did,  because people judge it without reading it.&quot;<p>The gut-reaction to such a title is to think the writer is saying &quot;depression doesn&#x27;t exist&quot; or &quot;schizophrenia doesn&#x27;t exist&quot; or &quot;manic depressives are lying.&quot;<p>This isn&#x27;t what he says in the book at all. Rather, his argument is more along the lines of:<p>1. The word &quot;illness&quot; should be used to represent a <i>cause</i>-- and resolving the cause should <i>cure</i> the illness. Cancer, the flu, hyperparathyroidism--all map to <i>causes</i>.<p>2. The conditions which we call mental illness don&#x27;t have a knowable cause. They are symptoms which we pattern match against.<p>3. Corollary: Illnesses should be hypothetically curable. There may <i>be</i> a cure for cancer. But there <i>cannot</i> be a &quot;cure&quot; for most &quot;mental illnesses&quot; because there is no shared, physical cause that underlies say, all cases of &quot;bipolar disorder&quot;.<p>3. So we shouldn&#x27;t call them &quot;illnesses&quot;. We should call them something else.<p>Unfortunately that&#x27;s about as much as I remember of his argument, but it&#x27;s very different than the common accusation... And it also strikes me as accurate.<p>The problem with naming things is that it makes them real. I think often the hacker news crowd forgets how ill-informed most of the world is, and the degree to which people crave certainty.<p>When a person is told by a psychiatrists &quot;Your 8 year has depression so we&#x27;ll put her on X pill&quot; or &quot;You have bipolar type 2, so I recommend Y medicine&quot;, it has a certain finality.<p>Most people don&#x27;t think &quot;The <i>doctor</i> is telling me that my behavior matches some patterns. That is it. She does not know why, and we may never know why, there may not even be a reason why. So we should think about what we can do to mitigate this.&quot;<p>No. The we think &quot;I&#x27;ve been diagnosed with a disease. (Sorry I&#x27;m being an a-hole|I won&#x27;t go to your party|didn&#x27;t get out of bed), I suffer from bipolar and there&#x27;s no cure&quot;.