A review by virtualmima
The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct by Thomas Szasz

4.25

Taken from the summary at the end of the book:

The principal arguments advanced in this book and their implications may be summarized as follows.
1. Strictly speaking, disease or illness can affect only the body; hence, there can be no mental illness.
2. "Mental illness" is a metaphor. Minds can be "sick" only in the sense that jokes are "sick" or economies are "sick."
3. Psychiatric diagnoses are stigmatizing labels, phrased to resemble medical diagnoses and applied to persons whose behavior annoys or offends others.
4. Those who suffer from and complain of their own behavior are usually classified as "neurotic"; those whose behavior makes others suffer, and about whom others complain, are usually classified as "psychotic."
5. Mental illness is not something a person has, but is something he does or is.
6. If there is no mental illness there can be no hospitalization, treatment, or cure for it. Of course, people may change their behavior or personality, with or without psychiatric intervention. Such intervention is nowadays called "treatment," and the change, if it proceeds in a direction approved by society, "recovery" or "cure."
7. The introduction of psychiatric considerations into the administration of the criminal law—for example, the insanity plea and verdict, diagnoses of mental incompetence to stand trial, and so forth—corrupt the law and victimize the subject on whose behalf they are ostensibly employed.
8. Personal conduct is always rule-following, strategic, and meaningful. Patterns of interpersonal and social relations may be regarded and analyzed as if they were games, the behavior of the players being governed by explicit or tacit game rules.
9. In most types of voluntary psychotherapy, the therapist tries to elucidate the inexplicit game rules by which the client conducts himself; and to help the client scrutinize the goals and values of the life games he plays.
10. There is no medical, moral, or legal justification for involuntary psychiatric interventions. They are crimes against humanity.

It's obvious that the advice given by Szasz was ignored and dismissed by the psychology profession, and it's obvious why that is. The mainstream "acceptance" of mental illness does not de-stigmatize it, instead it only solidifies the stigma into the popular mythology under pseudoscientific rationale. Psychology is not a science, as it does not and cannot follow the scientific method, since the scientific method does not account for living beings and subjective consciousness. The three biggest reasons for the popularity and expansion of the psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience industries is not because they contain any truth, but because they enforce conformity, silence the outcasts, and produce drug addicts through the pharmaceutical companies which are mostly just legal drug cartels validated by pseudoscience and capitalism. Involuntary psychiatric treatment is an obvious example of this, but even those who voluntarily accept a diagnosis without treatment are committing themselves to a life of being infantilized and dismissed by those who are made aware of the label with which they identify. Psychology is replacing the Church in controlling the population in a time of decentralized religion and nonreligion.

The invention of new categories of so-called mental illness does not make them any less illegitimate. These categories, unlike actual medical diseases, are defined by the "symptoms" without the necessity of having to discover a root cause. Every "mental illness" is nothing other than a cluster of pseudosymptoms that a committee decided should be considered an "illness" that can be diagnosed and treated. The insurance companies, who are not scientists or doctors in the slightest, have a pretty significant say in what should be considered a diagnosis. What passes for "mental illness" can either be a physical disorder that can be identified medically (such as head trauma, premature birth, or down syndrome), a maladjustment to the ways of society, or the result of a person being suggestible by the belief in the existence of mental illness. This third possibility often occurs when someone looks up symptoms and identifies themselves with an "illness" believing it is real. After some time of being convinced of the illness, they play the role of the "patient" and it can often be as convincing to others as it is to themselves. A lot of people go to therapy after reading about symptoms online and the therapists just take their word for it that they have whatever "illness" and prescribe them drugs. While we no longer have the ritual murder and witch hunts of "psychotics" in which they are "treated" with shock therapy and lobotomies, basically left as zombies, our society is much too accepting of the mass prescription of drugs that have a similar effect, often with permanent repercussions.

In addition, the pseudoscience of neurology is used to rationalize bigotry and popular mythology. The assumption, for instance, that men and women are neurologically by nature and biologically destined for the social roles they are given, is usually backed up with references to shoddy meaningless data taken by neurologists, much like their phrenological antecedents. No consciousness can be measured through an external reading of brainwaves. No matter how advanced technology becomes it will always be impossible to "read" a person's mind. Mindreading always has been and always will be nothing but fantasy, yet here we have tech bros and "serious" scientists alike talking without a hint of irony about the possibility of reading people's minds in the future using technology. In over a century of psychology being considered a science, not one thing in the entire field has been proven scientifically nor gone through the scientific method, and yet people believe in it like it's some kind of irrefutable fact. At best, psychology can be considered a school of philosophy. And that is how it should be treated by everyone.

Psychologists posing as medical doctors should be considered a human rights violation, in the same way as a priest making the same claim would be. The job of a psychologist, instead, should be the role of a philosopher, like the sophists of Ancient Greece. The psychologist should not be seeing "patients" or even "clients" but pupils instead. Their job should be to serve as guides to help people break out of the prisons they've trapped themselves in, or that society or a bad or confusing upbringing has trapped them in. Instead of bending to the will of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies by letting them define what is worthy of coverage based on pure ignorance, the state should subsidize access to psychologists without the need of any diagnosis, so that everyone can benefit from them without risking having their lives ruined by the outdated paradigm of so-called mental illness. There should be no diagnostic requirement for seeking therapy, and there should also be no diagnoses for anything that is not a true medical illness. Doctors and psychologists can work together in some cases, when a physical condition affects the mind, but they should be considered fully separate professions that are not even remotely related, like a doctor and a teacher.