The Myth of Mental Illness
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know
absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s
look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what
counts. I learned very early the difference between
knowing the name of something and knowing
something.”
Richard Feynman, Physicist and 1965 Nobel Prize laureate (1918-1988)
how they are transfused from father to son etcetera
etcetera – well you may take my word that nine parts in
ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and
miscarriages in this world depend on their motions and
activities, and the different tracks and trains you put
them into, so that when they are once set a-going,
whether right or wrong, away they go cluttering like
hey-go-mad.”
Lawrence Sterne (1713-1758), “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman” (1759)
…As the renowned anti-psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, of the State University of New York, notes in his article “The Lying Truths of Psychiatry”, mental health scholars, regardless of academic predilection, infer the etiology of mental disorders from the success or failure of treatment modalities. This form of “reverse engineering” of scientific models is not unknown in other fields of science, nor is it unacceptable if the experiments meet the criteria of the scientific method.
The theory must be all-inclusive (anamnetic), consistent, falsifiable, logically compatible,
monovalent, and parsimonious. Psychological “theories” – even the “medical” ones (the role of serotonin and dopamine in mood disorders, for instance) – are usually none of these things.
The outcome is a bewildering array of ever-shifting mental health “diagnoses” expressly centred around Western civilisation and its standards (example: the ethical objection to suicide).
Neurosis, a historically fundamental “condition” vanished after 1980. Homosexuality, according to the American Psychiatric Association, was a pathology prior to 1973. Seven years
later, narcissism was declared a “personality disorder”, almost seven decades after it was first described by Freud…
…Abstract concepts form the core of all branches of human knowledge. No one has ever seen a quark, or untangled a chemical bond, or surfed an electromagnetic wave, or visited the unconscious. These are useful metaphors, theoretical entities with explanatory or descriptive power.
“Mental health disorders” are no different. They are shorthand for capturing the unsettling quiddity of “the Other”. Useful as taxonomies, they are also tools of social coercion and conformity, as Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser observed. Relegating both the dangerous and the idiosyncratic to the collective fringes is a vital technique of social engineering. The aim is progress through social cohesion and the regulation of innovation and creative destruction.
Psychiatry, therefore, is reifies society’s preference of evolution to revolution, or, worse still, to mayhem. As is often the case with human endeavour, it is a noble cause, unscrupulously and dogmatically pursued…
Read more of this Free Psychology e-book at: http://www.ebooknet.org/download/free/psychology.pdf
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Fighting the Myth of Mental Illness…The Next Round
