I do not reject materialism. I am however saying that very few forms of behavior can be attributed with anything like a 1:1 correspondence to physical states of the brain.

For example, sometimes a person behaves psychotically, and it is later discovered that he had a tumor in his brain. But others with tumors don’t act similarly, and most psychotics don’t have tumors or any organic defect at all.

The materialist hypothesis hasn’t been falsified, but we have nothing like a plausible chain of causality here.

@24

Your analogy is flawed. It’s not a question of “using” or “not using” mental illness as a category of analysis. You are still free to use it, as long as you accept — for now in most respects, and probably for always in some — this will be a metaphor, not a literal assertion.

That said, if a patient wants to go to a doctor and receive drugs from him, I will not object. I favor drug legalization and medical freedom, even if some of the ways that people will use drugs will inevitably be disturbing or misguided by my lights, and even if only some ways of using drugs will strike me as wise.

exactly.

But this is a USEFUL claim because you can sometimes actually find organic causes, then devise drugs and treatments for them. The claim that the treatments help people can be falsified.

Since, in our society, murder, rape, etc. are sufficiently outside our norms of behavior, people who perform such behaviors are, by definition, insane. IMO, that’s not a valid reason for excusing them from prison, it’s a second reason to put them in prison.

You come closest to my views on the subject. There are several things going on here, only one of which is the fact, still undeniable, that most mental illness doesn’t have a clear causal chain from organic disease to dangerous/eccentric/”bad” behavior.

The other really important thing going on here is that when Szasz wrote, far, far too many conditions and behavior patterns were subject to involuntary confinement and/or treatment. To make things just a touch personal for me, one of these was homosexuality.

Szasz and his students see nothing wrong with permitting willing patients to get treatment, even if they do view “treatment” for “mental illness” as at best metaphorical. If psychiatry is a religion, then in this sense they are simply tolerant atheists — practice your religion, if you are helped by it, but don’t force it on others. There’s nothing at all inconsistent about this stance. It is rather admirable, if you ask me.

The other part of the Szaszian challenge might also be met one day. It’s possible that some erratic behavior patterns will eventually come to be associated with as-yet-unknown organic diseases. If that happens, then they will be proven wrong. But it hasn’t happened yet.

The Szaszian claim here is subject to falsification, which makes it a proper scientific claim. Its counterpart, which rules in mainstream psychiatry, is not similarly situated. One can go on saying “one day we’ll find an organic cause” forever, and that’s not a claim that we will ever likely falsify.

The pendulum has swung; it used to be appallingly easy to have someone committed to a state asylum, for long periods of time and for vague reasons. More than a few of Dr. Freeman’s lobotomy patients were simply teenage troublemakers, and he kept on giving lobotomies until the late sixties. I’d take Szasz over Freeman any day.

But leaving out the theory what does getting rid of the legal term “mental illness” mean in practice? If we leave what we now label “very mentally ill” people alone until they commit a crime, then put them in jail won’t they still be sick and dangerous when released? Not to metion our jails are terrible, brutal places and doubly so for folks with issues. In the last 30 years we started dealing with the people we used to put in institutions into jails, and I don’t see who it has helped.

A lot of folks who get involuntary treatment get it because their family requests it. Do we really have to let, say, an anorexic 15 year old daughter, starve to death, because it’s her “right”?

This seems like a theory with a propensity for casualties. How about some statistical evidence that this works better?

The way the severally mentally ill are treated in the United States is a national disgrace.

“A rebellious teenage PITA might well get a diagnosis of Oppositional Defiant Disorder.”
I think Romeo and Juliet had this. Also Holden Caulfield. And
every James Dean character. Also young Marlon Brando. Also
every teenager with an IQ over 73.

Heart disease can lead to a heart attack which will present with a variety of symptoms. Heart disease doesn’t consist of it’s symptoms. It can only be diagnosed by observing the symptoms and figuring out what’s causing them.

This reminds me when the previous South African president claimed hiv couldn’t cause aids because a syndrome can’t cause a disease.

Thinking of the mind in terms of hardware and software is a ready analogy but is problematic. Software is external and loaded onto a computer whereas the physical makeup of the brain gives rise to the phenomena of the mind. The mind body split is experiential sure there is no ghost in the machine. You are the machine. From a naturalistic perspective the division of diseases of the brain from diseases of the mind falls apart.

That’s not a good beginning. Dr. Szasz isn’t a pioneer; he’s an egoistic, attention-seeking fraud. He repeatedly proclaims that most people categorized as mentally ill are normal. He also proclaims that most psychiatric treatments (including non-drug analysis therapies) are detrimental. Yet, he treats “normal” people with voluntary conversations about their challenges and problems: exactly the same therapy used by other psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. When asked about severe mental illnesses such as psychosis, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, Szasz hems and haws and admits that perhaps *those* conditions really are due to neurochemical problems and require drug therapy. I call him the Great Relabeler: he relabels mental illness and their therapies and pretends he’s a rebel and a pioneer.

Szasz is correct when he states that some conditions are overdiagnosed. The epidemics” of attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and autism spectrum, and post-traumatic stress disorder are due exclusively to misdiagnosis, mostly by non-psychiatrists.

If their behavior causes no problems, they are ipso facto not mentally ill regardless of how psychotic they might be. They can hallucinate in stereo and technicolor, believe they’re a duck or God or the reincarnation of John Lennon, and as long as they don’t bother anyone, they’re considered okay. Strange, probably, but okay.

On the other hand, completely unexceptional behavior might get the person diagnosed.

For example, someone who comes to believe in the message ascribed to Jesus that we should look out for one another and who goes into the street and begins to give away the fortune he amassed might well find himself locked up as a loonie at the behest of his greedy children who believe that money is rightfully theirs.

A rebellious teenage PITA might well get a diagnosis of Oppositional Defiant Disorder. It’s a beauty — it pathologises what would otherwise be seen as “difficult” and vastly irritating, but not disordered, teenage behavior. It’s a “status disorder” — it only applies to pre-adults.

Someone who routinely violates the legitimate rights of other people without hesitation or remorse is diagnosable as a psychopath (“Anti-social Personality Disorder” in DSM4).

However, if that someone is wealthy, they are extremely unlikely to get a psychopath diagnosis. If their behavior is bad enough they might get a Narcissistic or Borderline diagnosis, but usually they escape diagnosis altogether. Wealth has its privileges.