Just came across this excellent summary of some of Thomas Szasz’s ideas on Wikipedia. Szasz was one of the pioneers of what would later be called the anti-psychiatry movement.
- The myth of mental illness: Mental illness is a metaphor. Illness is defined as an objectively demonstrable biological pathology that affects living creatures. Since mental illness describes undesirable behaviors, thoughts or feelings, there is no objective pathology to observe. The classification of certain behaviors as illnesses is a way of controlling undesirable people in society. By medicalising their behavior we give medicine and the state the remit to involuntarily detain and medicate such people to prevent them from behaving in ways society finds intolerable.
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